The end of the golden age for academia

Looking back, I realize that I came of age near the end of the golden age for universities. As an undergrad at UT-Knoxville, tuition* was ca. $160/quarter for a full load. As a grad student, I got 36 months of stipend from an NIH training grant, and my mentor’s grant paid my stipend for the other 24 months. Most of my postdoc support was from an NIH NRSA award. I was able to get a tenure-track faculty position doing basic science research, and six years later was promoted with tenure.

But the wheels were already starting to fall off by 1990, as federal research grant funding started to tighten. I was able to keep my lab funded most of the time, and the department had a substantial endowment that bridged it between grants.

Now, with the Trump and GOP attacks on higher ed, jobs are disappearing, the layoffs are increasing, and small colleges are closing at an increasing clip. I personally know people at Harvard and Brandeis in untenured faculty positions who lost their jobs because of financial exigency. The MD/PhD student who did his dissertation research in my lab has given up research as his medical school pushes him to see more billable patients in clinic. For now, most of the cuts fall on administration, staff and untenured faculty.

“These employees oversee admissions, maintain libraries, and provide mental health services, among a host of other responsibilities on campus. Many stay for decades, collecting a decent salary and good benefits and forming an important plank of Massachusetts’ middle class. But university staff positions are fragile compared to those of college presidents or tenured faculty. Most lack union protection and can be eliminated with little pushback from students and families.

“Recent months have brought terminations of 120 staff members at Boston University, 24 at WPI, and 5 percent of the non-faculty workforce at Clark University in Worcester, or around 30 people. Southern New Hampshire also laid off 60 employees in June, and termination notices have been handed out at the Harvard Kennedy School, Babson College, and the shuttered Great Barrington campus of Bard College.”

 

*snip*

 

“Regardless of the reason, staff are the most costly — and perhaps, the most easily cut — line item in universities’ budgets, said Sandy Baum, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Urban Institute. 

 

“Colleges and universities are facing all kinds of differing levels of disaster,” Baum said. “Personnel are just a huge share of the cost of running an institution. There’s no way they can save a lot of money without cutting their personnel costs.”

 

Some of this was foreseeable. The high school graduate demographic is shrinking, and college and university tuition rates were growing unsustainably. But Trump’s personal attacks on Harvard and other elite universities are erasing the old social contract between the government and academia. On top of that, Trump’s attack on immigration is discouraging foreign student enrollment, and these students were paying full tuition, subsidizing tuition for domestic students. The US higher education brand is tarnished by Trump policies and may never recover. US talent—graduate students, postdocs, faculty—are looking abroad and will take their intellectual capital with them.

*technically, UT didn’t charge tuition, these were called “fees”

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/27/business/university-administrator-layoffs/