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2025 Hiring Pause

hr.cornell.edu

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Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#21

Post by Reason077 »

testfoobar wrote: post #9

Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double... In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff. In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff. In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1 This is insane.

> "The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1"

> "This is insane."

"This expansion is largely at the School of Medicine, where the yearly staff growth rate of 5.6% is significantly higher than the 1.7% rate across the rest of the University...

School of Medicine spokesperson Courtney Lodato wrote that the increase largely includes clinical educators who teach and provide clinical care, financed by external research funds from government and industry sources"

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#22

Post by duskwuff »

mi_lk wrote: post #16
DrBenCarson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that endowments are highly illiquid and typically are not used to fund budgets

that's just misinformation. > In particular, the endowment supports roughly two-thirds of the budget for undergraduate and graduate financial aid, as well as a significant portion of faculty salaries, research, and key programs like libraries and student services. from https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring

The returns from the endowment are used to support university programs. The endowment itself is not spent - it's a long-term investment which produces dividends, not a spending fund.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#25

Post by 28304283409234 »

cuuupid wrote: post #19
submeta wrote: post #4

> due to "significant financial uncertainty" in higher education, This is directly linked to the new Trump administration's policies. The university explicitly cites potential deep cuts to federal research funding, new tax legislation affecting endowment income, and ongoing concerns about rapid growth and escalating costs as primary reasons for this decision. This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have…

> This move comes as Cornell and 11 other universities have filed a lawsuit against the National Institutes of Health over funding restrictions that could cost Cornell $80 million. This is less than 0.75% of Cornell's endowment, so I'm not sure there is a strong case for causation here.

What is Cornell's endowment used for? Edit: Also: Who were the donors? What restrictions did they place on their donation?

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#26

Post by freehorse »

testfoobar wrote: post #9

Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double... In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff. In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff. In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1 This is insane.

What is "staff"? Is there a break down on how much "staff" is involved in research tasks vs admin tasks? Research nowadays is complex and requires a lot of technical support, a lot of people who are hired as technical-administrative stuff may do actually purely research tasks [0]. As usually faculty captures people in some "professorship" level, it completely misses this big crowd of research-related work.

[0] source: me

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#27

Post by machinekob »

testfoobar wrote: post #9

Here is a 2024 article from the Stanford Daily: https://stanforddaily.com/2024/03/13/behind-stanfords-double... In 1996: 13,811 students, 1488 faculty, 5881 total staff. In 2024: 17,529 students, 2323 faculty, 16,527 total staff. In 28 years: 27% increase in students 56% increase in faculty 281% increase in total staff The ratio of staff to students is nearly 1:1 This is insane.

Contemporary academia especially in the West has a massive surplus of staff.

Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.

Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#28

Post by pclmulqdq »

duskwuff wrote: post #22
mi_lk wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that's just misinformation. > In particular, the endowment supports roughly two-thirds of the budget for undergraduate and graduate financial aid, as well as a significant portion of faculty salaries, research, and key programs like libraries and student services. from https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2025/02/staff-hiring

The returns from the endowment are used to support university programs. The endowment itself is not spent - it's a long-term investment which produces dividends, not a spending fund.

Universities will dip into endowment funds if the returns are worse than expected. They will pretty much never make plans to dip into endowment funds, though.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#29

Post by freehorse »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
mrtksn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the non-faculty staff does? Is it maybe connected to technical staff? They Can’t all be management?

Janitorial, technical, nutritional … basically anyone not involved in educating students “non-faculty.”

So including people performing a big chunk of essential research tasks and who do not fall into the "professor" or "student" category.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#30

Post by abdullahkhalids »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #18
mrtksn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does the non-faculty staff does? Is it maybe connected to technical staff? They Can’t all be management?

Janitorial, technical, nutritional … basically anyone not involved in educating students “non-faculty.”

I would assume non-student TAs (who do teach students), lab technical staff (who maintain equipment and and more directly enable teaching than janitorial staff) and such are also all non-staff.
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