Fanta Aw
speaker
39 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Fanta Aw’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So when you add it up, it starts to become real money. And you can see how critical the research amount is for the operating budget. Research mostly comes from the government. And the way it works is it'll be an agency, the National Institute of Health or a group like that will write a check to the university. The fiduciary of the university is the board of
directors of the trustees so that the check gets written to them but it's really being sent to the researcher who came up with a really good idea that impressed a lot of people and made it through a really intense vetting process and the nih or whoever decided this is such a good idea we want to fund this research That money goes to the board and then the school is going to keep a chunk of it.
They have something called the facilities and administration. And that can be north of 50% because that pays for the labs and the administrators and the electricity. And there's a lot of things that go into running a university. What's left over pays for the grad students, the researcher, whatever is needed to do the research itself.
One of the things that the Trump administration has done is said, we don't wanna pay 50, 60 percent in facilities and administration. We want that limited to 15 percent. So that was one of the first things that Trump did. And it really threw a monkey wrench in the budgets of these universities because that money is used by the university to keep the lights on. And it's fungible.
If that money is suddenly getting cut by two thirds, that's just less money coming into the system. And, you know, it has to come from somewhere else.
So Trump is using a new set of tools to pull grant money. They created this task force that's looking at the contracts that the researchers have received, and they're canceling or freezing those contracts, using language in the contracts, as opposed to going through the Title VI procedures. The Title VI is a civil rights, you have to go through certain things in order to stop funding that way.
So there's a different tool being used, and that's part of why this is sort of legally on new ground.
The faculty, the AAUP, which is the Union for the Faculty at Harvard and at Columbia, has filed a lawsuit on the ground that the Trump administration does not have the right to cancel research grants and to tell them what to research and what to teach on campus, that that's a violation of their First Amendment rights.
And we're moving into uncharted territories here, so the courts are going to have to weigh in on this.
Right. So there's two actors here. There's the researcher and there's the institution. So there's less money for the institution. So they're figuring out how to cut back. For the researchers, it's calamitous because this is their entire income stream.
One NIH grant can keep dozens of people employed and an entire research project, which may be spread across several institutions or even around the globe. Now the checks stop cashing. The research comes to an end. People are lose their jobs unless there's a way to tap another source and experiments or projects that may have been going on for years can get canceled.
And that's why it's such an existential issue for the research community.
So around two thirds of the costs to run a university are people. They're going to get rid of people. They're not going to fill positions. They're going to hold off on raises. They're going to trim benefits. It's like every other corporation when there's not enough money coming in. The workers are going to feel a pinch. That's going to be the main thing.
Projects are going to get shelved, things that were going to be built. There was money earmarked for them from a particular donor, but maybe the school had to match a piece of that. Now the school can't match it, so they're going to postpone. That's the sort of thing that's likely to happen.
Some schools are really dependent on tuition and some schools less so, right? Some schools are getting 75% of their revenue from tuition. But if there's less money in the pot, usually what happens is the chief financial officer says to the admissions director, we need to generate $50 million from this year's class.
And so you can give scholarships and grants, but we need to get that much money coming through the front door, which means that there's pressure on the admissions folks to bring in enough kids who can pay enough money to hit that number. And ultimately, that will mean some kids will get smaller packages and they won't go to that school.
And the field will sort of tilt in favor of kids who are able to pay in full. So that's how this will round out at some schools. But you say that there's not that many kids in America, families in America who are able to pay full freight for universities. So the sticker price for schools keeps going up, but the net price is now going down because there's fewer people who can afford it.
So there creates pressure at kind of at every point.
Boom. Pressure that universities are under is to maintain the money so they're turning more toward adults and people who didn't graduate college. They're trying to be more entrepreneurial. They're trying to attract more adults. They're trying to go more online.
You see little one-offs, assisted living and senior living popping up near universities so that those people can enjoy what's happening on a college campus and the resources there, which is also a financial benefit for universities. So there's little green shoots happening around the country that universities are experimenting with to bring in more money.
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