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2025 Hiring Pause

hr.cornell.edu

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Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#91

Post by giantg2 »

tinier_subsets wrote: post #86
giantg2 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all about the choices. Post secondary schools had easy money (student loans, grants, expanding endowments) and rapidly expanding enrollment for decades. It seems many schools thought that would continue, but we saw enrollment plateau and even decrease. Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices. Other schools will likely cut staff/services…

> Ivy schools have options - lower prestige to increase enrollment, or lean on prestige and endowments to raise prices. Ivies aren’t dependent on tuition at all. All have need-blind admissions and most offer full rides to anyone accepted who couldn’t pay otherwise. Penn just updated its income thresholds to provide guaranteed full tuition scholarships to families earning less than 200k a year and budgeted over $300m/…

Based on history, ivy schools have substantially increased enrollment to bolster endowment, so it seems that's the track they're taking.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#92

Post by evil-olive »

machinekob wrote: post #27
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…

> Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time.

do you have any concrete evidence (that is not based on vibes, anecdotes, or "everyone knows") to support this claim?

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#93

Post by abdullahkhalids »

LeafItAlone wrote: post #67
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>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. They are considered staff.

Sorry. I did mean they are staff, and that they are "necessary" staff for the core function of teaching.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#94

Post by dingnuts »

fsh wrote: post #73
loganriebel wrote: post #6

Cornell has an endowment of 10.7 billion dollars. https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/10/university-endowmen...

With an optimistic 10% annual return, this would amount to 1/5 of Cornell's budget.

then they need to find some cuts because Uncle Sam has a maxed out credit card and can't keep making up the difference whether he wants to or not

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#95

Post by daveguy »

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.

So you're saying the ratio has improved? An education improving their ratio of faculty to students seems like a good thing.

Aren't all the big bad billionaires self-made autodidacts?

Most people aren't. Most people benefit from education. If there are unlimited AGI educators, that seems like an extraordinary claim and I haven't even seen a pilot. Is the plan to move fast and break education? Cause that seems kind of extreme rather than any sort of conservative I've ever known.

Do you just want to destroy those posh academic institutions? Or are the billionaires offering to subsidize education with donations by increasing taxes on themselves?

Or you don't realize that "faculty" can include researchers?

I'm confused. Can you clarify?

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#96

Post by DidYaWipe »

Can't speak in regard to Cornell, but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments. It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.

My university jacked tuition 24% in one year; and when asked why, they essentially said "because everyone else did."

For this and other offensive behavior, I instructed them to never again ask me for a penny; and they haven't.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#97

Post by trescenzi »

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.

Universities run small cities. That staff number includes the people who mow the lawn, cook food, clean dorms, work security, maintain their networks, etc the list is massive.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#98

Post by afthonos »

ein0p wrote: post #83
naijaboiler wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, many Medical schools are schools only in the technical definition of schools. In reality they are more like research and medical centers that also do a bit of teaching on the side. Staff to students ratio could easily be in excess of 10:1 A little over a decade ago, I remember Dean of a top medical school I attended showing the budget of the medical school. Tuition was like 5% or of the entire med school r…

How come the ratio was so much lower before? Could it be the (mostly useless) administrative positions?

The parenthetical is doing most of the lifting in that sentence.

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#99

Post by gruez »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #96

Can't speak in regard to Cornell, but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments. It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums. My university jacked tuition 24% in one year; and when asked why, they essentially said "because everyone else did." For this and other offensive behav…

>but I think it's well past time to revoke the tax-exempt status of schools that rip students off with sky-high tuition while sitting on huge endowments

As other people have mentioned in this thread, the point of endowments is to provide a steady source of income for the university's activities, not a piggy bank you can raid.

>It's even worse when they're blowing money on athletic programs and new stadiums.

I'm sure the right is equally mad about universities "blowing money" on humanities programs as well. Should we get rid of those as well?

Re: 2025 Hiring Pause

#100

Post by brianleb »

Reason077 wrote: post #21
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…

Haven't seen anyone mention this yet: there is a difference between "listed employees" vs. "full time employees" (FTEs) vs. "full time employee equivalents" (FTEEs). In this very specific case, physicians/providers often work 0.125-0.875 (i.e. one hour to seven hours of an 8 hour day) for one entity (say, their primary teaching hospital), and the remainder for another entity (the university where they are also an listed as adjunct professor, etc.).

You could have 10,000 employees, however 4,000 of them are physicians/providers, 3,000 of whom work less than full time for that entity. So you are looking at 10,000 employees, but some number between 7,000 and 9,999 FTEEs. These are very different, and very relevant, numbers when looking at healthcare organizations.

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