American science to soon face its largest brain drain in history

Are institutions elsewhere massively increasing funding and positions?

Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already? Where's that money going? The football team?

I don't know where that money is going, but from my own experience, research at universities really isn't supported by tuition money. At least in STEM, PhD students are paid for by grants and contracts that their advisors secured from sources like NSF, DARPA, NIH, NSA, etc. Those are the people actually execute the research.

You might want to say tuition should support research, but the reality is that it doesn't.

Why would we want tuition to support research?

When grants are cancelled and people are fired, new grants and new staff do not magically appear. It's an extreme strain and an unexpected expense on these institutions, not to mention a huge disruption for the lives of the people involved.

The gov't here in Norway put $10 million on the table[1] for 2026 as a response to what's going on in the US. Due to reasons they can't direct it solely at US researchers, but the intent is there:

The minister has followed the recent developments in the United States closely:

"Academic freedom is under pressure in the United States, and it is an unpredictable situation for many researchers in what has been the world's leading research nation for many decades. We have had close dialogue with the Norwegian knowledge communities and my Nordic colleagues about the development. It has been important for me to find good measures that we can put in place quickly, and therefore I have asked the Research Council to prioritize grant funding schemes that we can implement rapidly," says Aasland.

The program is meant to last years, we'll see how it goes.

Now I know, $10m ain't much in the grand scheme of things, but we're just 5 million folks over here.

[1]: https://www.forskningsradet.no/en/news/2025/100-million-nok-...

That’s like a couple of DoE grants in the US.

I don’t know if it should be called “massive,” but in Japan both the government and universities have announced increased funding:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/38843335-64cd-4c03-bdbc-a77...

If we assume science still has new things to tell the world, who better for researchers to share their discoveries with than the next generation? That’s the argument, anyway. In practice, it’s a crapshoot. Many researchers are dreadful educators due to incentives, training, and disposition. Every now and then you’ll run across a researcher who is also a great educator, but there’s no institutional force that pushes them in the right direction.

> Aren't all the non-bankruptible tuition fees providing plenty of funding already?

No. Having worked in academia for years, most of my funding came from the NSF. Sometimes it was from the state government, or private organizations partnering with us instead. Usually the university took a 50%+ cut of the grants we got as "overhead" too...

It's an example showing that institutions elsewhere are actually responding to this (a question asked by the parent post), and Norway will very likely not be alone here.

That explains why you would want researchers to teach students, but not why students (who generally have little to no income to speak of and are already struggling with university costs in the US) should directly pay for research

Can confirm, universities aren't giving money to researchers- they're actually taking a cut of the grants that actually fund research. They don't even pay salaries, that's only in exchange for teaching hours.

Thankfully, since grants started putting caps on how much the university is allowed to take I haven't seen a 50% overhead cut in a long time. It's still a pretty significant chunk though.

Universities produce scholarship. That's expensive.

Given all that university students are asked to pay for already, it would seem rather odd to ask them to also pay for the world's cancer research.

AFAIK the massive influx of cash into universities for the last 30 years or so has gone into administration, which is basically a jobs program, not academics.

Norway is a small (albeit wealthy) country. For conparables, you want to keep an eye on EU and Chinese science funding, and see if they're taking advantage of it. Norway is a good existence proof of countries reacting to this though.

Yea that's practically nothing, even accounting for your population. It's $2/person compared to NASA's pre-cut budget of about $80/person/year. Where are all these other countries that might pick up the slack? Seems nobody else in the world wants to pay for science. They might complain about American science funding cuts but are happy to keep their already tiny science budgets tiny.

Norway's overall science budget is $1 billion per year, or $200/person/year. US's was $200 billion/year or $600/person/year. So Norway isn't really pulling its weight.

There's no shortage of voc-techs and colleges for teaching skills & trades.

I personally think undergraduate at a big (research) university is bad for most students. But the prestige ain't nothing.

Yeah I just mentioned Norway since I'm Norwegian. Other EU countries are doing similar, like France[1].

[1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/meet-first-academic-refugees...

I think the cynical student paying tuition in America would ask what the money is actually paying for and why it can’t cover the full cost of programs and research given that it’s so high.

Let’s say you go to Ohio State. The out of state (unsubsidized) tuition comes out to about $37,000 for full time tuition. That’s around 108 hours of instruction per year by my estimation.

Students are paying $342 per lecture hour, which means each professor is bringing in between $3000-30,000 per hour.

Sure they have to grade papers but…come on, right?

How is this not wildly profitable?

This does not include room and board, which has to be even more wildly profitable. Imagine being able to charge $1200 a month for a shared room with no kitchen or private bathroom with some cafeteria slop as included food.

I finished a formal university degree recently and probably only 1/4 of my professors were actually actively decent and all the lessons were heavily recycled copy paste jobs that get passed around the department.

Online school makes this an even worse value since the professor just grades electronic work and spends one hour a week on chat hours, with the rest of the lectures being pre-recorded or pre-written.

To be clear, I personally believe the government of wealthy nations should fully cover the cost of higher education to anyone who wants it because it’s a no-brainer obvious investment that pay off in positive societal ROI. My commentary simply concerns the status quo where costs are high despite subsidy and endowments still existing.

I believe that's tuition. Grants fund scientists research directly. It funds labs, hires grad students, etc

100M NOK is a 1% increase to Norway's annual research budget, but to replace what the current US administration is asking Congress to cut the whole of Europe would have to raise its funding level by 300-400%.

Unfortunately the way students and the culture around them require in a university is much more than instruction hours. You need to pqy for all the infrastructure and the amenities that these students except and many will choose based on that. I was talking to a couple of parents during a visit recently and they focused more on what the experience their kids will get at my university. They were mostly not talking about education experience.

And most universities don't have any significant endowment and they don't work like what you think. Most of these are money for specific goal. i.e as rich alumni of CS program I can donate $100m and ask the university to invest them or put them in a bank and then pay grants for CS students. The university is legally bounded to not use the money for anything else. But this will be counted as +$100m endowment money for my university.

A decent chunk of the grant money goes to the university, and a chunk of the money used to pay the students also loops back to the university in the form of non-tuition fees, rent etc.

Where did you get that $1 billion figure from? From what I can see[1][2], it's more like $4.6 billion? In that case it would be more like $920/person/year.

[1]: https://www.fpol.no/det-norske-statsbudsjettet-2025-gir-en-n...

[2]: https://nifu.brage.unit.no/nifu-xmlui/handle/11250/3166076 (second page, first section)

Right; a professor's tenure at many research universities depends on the professor's publication and grant-raising success, with less of an emphasis on a professor's teaching performance.

That's one of the things I like about teaching at a community college; whether or not I get tenure is based largely on my teaching performance, with service to the college and community making up the remainder of my evaluation. While I don't have upper-division undergrads, grad students, or postdocs, I have no research pressures whatsoever, which, interestingly enough, is the ultimate form of research freedom. I don't have a lot of time during the school year since I teach a 4-4 load, but I'm officially off duty during my one-month winter break and my 2.5-month summer break, which means I could do whatever I want during my breaks, including research (I'm actually in Japan right now as a visiting researcher at a Japanese university).

There are some teaching-oriented universities that have different balances regarding the importance of teaching and research in making tenure/promotion decisions, ranging from comprehensive masters-focused universities like those in the California State University system to private liberal arts colleges such as Swarthmore.

Perhaps I was unclear. The argument is that being educated by a groundbreaking researcher is better than being educated by someone who merely knows things, and so it’s worth a tuition premium. Like I said, I think that position is full of holes, but it’s not incoherent.

It's worth considering that there's still a chance that the cuts end up being more limited than proposed.

Kind of like the tariffs or the Tiktok ban that's totally going to go into effect after the most recent extended grace period ends.

So it makes sense that the current raises aren't big enough to make up the shortfall. They're aniticipatory in nature, with the assumption that the actual cuts will be a lot less crazy, and increases to take advantage of a talent exodus will take some time to ramp up.

Before universities became so expensive - yes, there was a time when they weren't - it made sense for research funding to come from our taxes.

But, if university is going to be so expensive, then we the people, and especially the students are being double-taxed - first for the education, and then to support research.

The irony of ironies is that all that research is going to put all those students that paid for it out of a job!

I think we need a lesson in just funding practices here. Tuition is supposed to cover the costs of educating the person paying tuition. It is absurd that students should be saddled with the burden of paying for someone’s research. By what right? This is financial exploitation.

Using taxes is different, as public money and how it is used is the result of either consensus or some authority’s judgement that some public money should be invested in research for the sake of the common good. Even here, the privatization of profits and socialization of losses is criminal, not to mention the gatekeeping of research results funded by public money.

I understand that there is non-academic infrastructure and amenities, but I’m not sure the cost gap is very well explained. I’m paying a multiple orders of magnitude cost premium on my professor’s wage depending on the size of my class and somehow I’m supposed to believe that it isn’t sufficient to pay for some amenities, building maintenance, and other reasonable overhead?

Planet fitness can make a killing on $20/month gym memberships but supposedly the campus recreation center is the bleeding me dry?

This also doesn’t explain how my online state school only had a slight discount over in-person instruction to take classes online. Like I said in my first comment, my professors only performed live instruction for an hour a week and taught with recycled and off-the-shelf materials.

Unsubsidized tuition room and board is higher than the median individual salary.

I think that if there was some kind of mandate or incentive to reduce costs that we would suddenly see cost reduction with very little compromise. But as it stands, everyone involved is incentivized to keep prices as high as possible.

I've lost it now, some site said 10 billion NOKs. Maybe it's classified in different ways. Either way, Norway is spending more on science than typical countries. Surprising if it's more per capita than the US though.

> Maybe it's classified in different ways.

This was my leading thought as well.

> Surprising if it's more per capita than the US though.

Well we do have these pipes in the ocean that spew money... Our oil fund is currently contributing 25% of the national budget, despite being below the somewhat stringent self-imposed spending rule[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_budgetary_rule