I thought the purpose of this was to reduce waste. Firing a low cost administrator and replacing them with N highly-trained (and higher cost) Ph.D.s is not efficient use of taxpayer dollars.
The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research. You cannot do that if you take all the resources and spend on managers and administrative staff.
If that's the goal, firing the administrative staff will have exactly the opposite effect. Administrative staff and managers free researchers to do research. If administrative staff and managers are fired, researchers will be administrating and managing instead of researching.
Getting rid of administrators doesn't obviate the need to administrate. It has to be done, so we do it efficiently using shared resources, which brings economies of scale -- that efficiency Musk keeps talking about. What you're arguing for is increasing waste so everyone has less time to do critical work.
Here's an analogy:
To support the roof of a house, you need a few support beams. To support the roof of a skyscraper, you need many more support beams. You can't support the roof of a skyscraper with the number of support beams that support the roof of a house.
University research started as a house, but now it's a sky scraper. You're coming into the skyscraper saying there's too many beams, but you're judging by house standards. Maybe there are, but most of them were put there for good, well-considered reasons; as a layman you have no idea which are load bearing, so if you come knocking them down you endanger the whole tower. Which is a shame because it's gotten really really tall - taller than any other tower in history - so toppling it because you don't understand it would be a huge loss for everyone.
> The goal is to have more researchers that will do high impact research
Given that my comments are downvoted like crazy, I've got the feeling that the US university including the Professors (tenured) are missing the forest from the trees regarding this issue.
I once asked a senior and prominent US Professor regarding their multi-million dollars grant for single project that can be easily spent on multi-project with similar or higher impact in other countries. His answer was they have to spent a lot on students, and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.
This is a good thing. It's expensive to support a Ph.D. student in America; it's a lot cheaper if you're in a country with lower cost of living. But as a researcher, you want to do research in an expensive area because it means you'll be around other smart people and lots of resources.
At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems.
> and now I know the truth that most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff, what as waste.
Perhaps you forget or ignored to read the complete sentence.
> At the end of the day tho, despite all its flaws, this system is a winner; US produces the most research, is home to the best universities, and students from around the world dream of studying in America. We can make improvements, but the need for a rewrite of the system is greatly overstated. Other countries wish they had our problems
I admire your strange perspective on govt's money spending on research but let's be honest it's not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads. Nothing last forever the, wastages and corruptions (wealth and morals) are the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls (Egypt, Roman, Iranian Sassanids, Ottoman, British, Russian, Indian Moghul and Chinese Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, etc).
How do you square that math with your assertion that "most of the money are going to the research managers and admin staff"? You can at least admit you are expressing very strong opinions here for someone who doesn't have a firm grasp on the issues and no relevant experience working in this area. You're not aware of the fractal of complexity in this area, and you boiled it down into a heuristic which is smugly wrong.
> not sustainable with so much wastage on unnecessary overheads.
You can't really articulate how these things are wasteful, so why are you concluding the overheads are unnecessary? See my sibling reply to the OP using the analogy of a skyscraper.
You are a person coming in the middle floor of the sky scraper saying "What are all these beams for? They seem unnecessary, let's get rid of them."
The engineers and architects who built the sky scraper told you those beams are holding up the roof.
You say "I know better, they are waste and unnecessary overhead!"
The engineers and architects point out towers of the past were much smaller. People expect towers today to be taller than ever before, and if you want taller buildings you need more and more support beams. Gutting the tower of support beams will cause it to collapse in short order.
We can talk about how to rearchitect the tower to use fewer beams overall, because that's a worthwhile discussion. But this approach of "slash all the waste!" is basically a game of Jenga, because you aren't sure what's actually waste and what's load bearing.
> the main reasons the richest of countries and empires falls...
The main reason empires fall is because people who have no experience building them take over and drive them into the ground with their own hubris and ignorance.
