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Notes -
Penn is rescinding some PhD offers as part of cuts to graduate programs in light of DOGE funding changes. Vandy, USC, and Pitt are pausing PhD admissions for now, which feels slightly more reasonable than rescinding.
It's interesting that the cuts are occurring to the "next generation" of incoming talent, although it somewhat makes sense - Penn PhDs are funded, with very nice stipends. Rescinding is still a big move, though, when Penn could cut administrative bloat or decrease the full funding such that potential candidates decide not to join the program in the first place. The whole point of the Ivy, I mean, Ivory Tower is to strengthen their own prestige and little robots, so rescinding feels weird. There's also the ability to dip into the endowment, but I know that gets complicated fast.
I am also wondering how they're deciding who to rescind from. Are any international future students getting the boot? Are there DEI level decisions being made after the fact, as a way of getting around affirmative action? Are they going to change their minds if funding frees up if lawsuits throw down or the DOGE pause ends?
I'm a law student, and firms talk a lot about lessons learned from the financial crisis. An entire "generation" of talent was lost from cutting start classes during the crisis, and firms really feel it now - it had longer term impacts down the road to not just take the financial hit of having a few new associates bumbling around. I wonder if academia is about to undergo the same learning experience?
Or will academia, particularly STEM, turn to embrace private funding more thoroughly? Private influence in STEM academic research could increase innovation and development, and solve the "funding crisis" presented from the withdrawal of government funds. The influence of private interests in nonprofits/educational institutions is an old culture war argument, but one that might start playing out among graduate programs.
It's also interesting that undergraduate programs, for now, aren't getting hit. Maybe they're more lucrative/cash cows, although many are moving to full need-based funding. Maybe it's the demographic cliff.
Naturally, universities like Penn, Vanderbilt, USC, and Pitt would rather take out cost-cutting on graduate students and faculty than administration and staff. A combination of malicious compliance and self-interest—it reminds me of those graphs that show the growth in number of administration and staff far outpacing the growth in faculty and students over the past few decades.
It makes for a good sob story that Orange Man is rug-pulling the next generation of young scientists, each of whom would surely had gone on to do great things like finding the cure for cancer or implementing Star Trek's replicator (as opposed to the typical path(s) of eking out some marginal publications in graduate school to graduate before falling out of academia, or moving on to continue the publish-or-perish flailing with marginal publications as a postdoc, young faculty member, tenure-track faculty member, etc.). A better sob story than dismissing administrators en masse, where any news articles might cause even normies to ask "wait, why were there so many of these people working or ‘working’ there in the first place?" along the lines of the Claudine Gay resignation.
The status of American universities is like a dark comedy out in the open, where the parasite has taken over the host. Supposed institutes of higher learning, research, and teaching serve as daycares for young adults first (there's even bread—mealplans! and circuses—colleges sports!), make-work for administrators second, research a distant third, and teaching a fourth from there.
Came here to post this. Rescinding PhD offers is throwing-toys-out-of-the-pram tier malicious compliance: and their decisions of who to cut will likely be based on which student they think can most convincingly cry in a CNN interview about how Trump crushed their family’s dreams of escaping poverty through studying hard.
It’ll damage the university in the long run and it would be much easier for them to cut administrators, but there’s a Principal-Agent-Problem here where the it’s the Admin department who decides what cuts to make and they’re sure as hell not going to be making them in the Admin department.
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