Wednesday, February 19, 2025

The DOGE Brain Drain Has Begun

THREE DAYS AFTER the National Institutes of Health abruptly announced it would place a strict, low cap on the money it sends to universities and research institutions for the administrative costs of scientific research, the University of Iowa made an abrupt announcement of its own. The school's Office of the Vice President for Research declared that going forward, it would pause "the hiring of new Graduate Research Assistants unless they are already budgeted as a direct cost on a funded project." The announcement sent shockwaves through parts of academia, providing an alarming demonstration of the impact the NIH cap would have on aspiring scientists. "We were pretty stunned," the chair of the biochemistry and molecular biology department at a top university told The Bulwark.

Comments

The mush-brained orange diaper sniper is determined to make all universities as useless as Trump U.

#1 | Posted by reinheitsgebot at 2025-02-19 09:57 AM

One positive effect of this will be the discontinuation of over recruiting by grad programs for the exploitation of cheap labor while producing more PhDs than there are jobs for.

When I was in grad school, the fall back if you left academia was to go into industry, which seemed to have an endless need for PhDs willing to make the jump. Not any more. Even industry is saturated and with so much talent floating around, the biotech/pharma job markets have been an absolute bloodbath.

A few years from now, when a new equilibrium is reached (hopefully...), a secondary positive effect might be universities creating more stable, better paid permanent positions like staff scientists or senior scientists or, with any luck, more research track professorships to pick up the research slack while dealing with the decrease in exploitable workers.

I'm sure none of this was even considered by the idiots making these changes, but it's a potentially positive outcome in a s*&^ situation.

#2 | Posted by jpw at 2025-02-20 01:20 AM

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