Academia covers the working side of higher education: careers and pay, teaching practice and institutional decisions.
A PhD student's funding, authorship, timeline and references all route through a single person — and the system's numbers show why that concentration matters.
Between January 2023 state bans and a 2025 federal campaign, diversity offices closed and job titles changed — the concrete shifts, and what the lawsuits left open.
Endowments are thousands of restricted pots earning investment returns, and the payout rules that govern them explain the strangest number in higher education.
The annual meeting is where academic careers are made — and its registration fees plus travel costs quietly ration who gets to be there.
NSF funds roughly one in five proposals through a review system built on two criteria, rotating panels and a program officer who manages the match.
After decades of legal whiplash, graduate worker unions now cover more than a hundred thousand academic workers — and their contracts are rewriting stipend norms.
Researchers donate tens of millions of reviewing hours a year to journals whose subscriptions their libraries also pay for — a strange economics that is showing strain.
The United States holds tens of thousands of postdoctoral researchers, and the economics of the position — pay, duration, and the queue behind it — have quietly become academia's sharpest contradiction.
Most US college teaching is now done by instructors off the tenure line, paid per course, without research support or a contract beyond a semester.
Indirect cost reimbursements built the laboratories that direct grants furnish — and a 2025 cap attempt turned a 50-year-old accounting rule into a political fight.