It's time to start a thread on higher ed budget cuts announced due to actual and potential cuts to federal funding. Northwestern is placing additional scrutiny on all spending and trying to cut non-personnel spending by 10% this year.
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Vanderbilt has apparently paused doctoral student admissions (they fully fund everyone accepted). Expect quite a bit of this at wealthier institutions that typically guarantee funding.
Recently heard tRump, Musk, MAGA, & DOGE referred to as cancers killing America. They know it too.
Then it dawned on me - so that’s why they are ending cancer research!!!
Maybe we can use that Secret Jewish Space Laser!
Columbia has +19 BILLION $. Universities have so much money yet have made tuition out of reach for most. They are amongst the most greedy in this country. Totally lost their mission.
I'm fearful of how these cuts will impact admissions decisions at schools that meet full need. One of our students got a likely letter (and calls from current undergrads) from such an institution then denied ED2 and my thoughts immediately went to the funding cuts institutions are fearing.
Sure, let's kneecap researchers with bird flu rising. I don't mind paying twenty bucks for eggs and I'm sure KFC will be fine with no chicken to sell.....
Vanderbilt hasn't stopped doctoral admissions 100%. They are allowing some departments to make some offers, but they're throttling back a lot from where they were at the beginning of the year.
You're spot on that this has a lot to do with the promise to fully fund everyone admitted for five years.
These cuts seem significantly larger than any loss of income from NIH. I assume admins had retnrenchment plans in their pockets and are just pulling them out now in anticipation of larger cuts just down the road?
Salaries at Boston University are not as insanely grotesque as salaries at Northwestern but still you could save a million dollars or so if the overfed pigs at the top made some minor gesture
Looking at the grotesque salaries at Northwestern, you could easily save *12 million dollars* if, gasp, the senor staff had to , somehow, survive on a salary of one million dollars a year
I know that would require extreme sacrifice, but we all need to do a little something
Not all of those are administrative. The neurosurgery salary seems totally fine, for instance. My guess is that the Kellogg salaries are just market competitive, though wow…
Raviv’s website bio shows him as emeritus (retired) so I wonder if this is out of date? Still those salaries are very high. He’s in finance. Guessing that private sector compensation in the field is part of why it is so high. But as a humanities prof at regional comprehensive, it’s hard to fathom.
It’s not clear to me what a 10% cut would do in light of a nuclear winter of both educational and research funding whose goal seems to be not the co-opting of institutions (as in other competitive authoritarian regimes), but total destruction.
@kuow.org reported this evening that UW Medicine was instituting a hiring freeze due to uncertainty in funding. Heard it on the newscast but can't find a link.
The silence of the universities and colleges and their failures to defend their students and programs will be one of the great moral failings of our time
I don’t know. Many of these universities have billions of dollars in their endowments. The fact they “depend” so heavily on government funding is kind of ridiculous.
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https://www.thedp.com/article/2025/02/penn-graduate-student-class-size-cut-trump-funding
https://bsky.app/profile/lilyroberts.bsky.social/post/3li7ofiuvnc2s
Then it dawned on me - so that’s why they are ending cancer research!!!
Maybe we can use that Secret Jewish Space Laser!
You're spot on that this has a lot to do with the promise to fully fund everyone admitted for five years.
I know that would require extreme sacrifice, but we all need to do a little something
I wonder how many of these were planned already Uber existing HE threats and using the federal chaos as a reason for them.
Wright State Univ in Dayton, OH has had a budget crisis for the past few years. Their endowment is approx $100 million. There's no way Wright State University can absorb $1 million in federal funding cuts. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/02/13/upshot/nih-trump-funding-cuts.html