Brown University will slash 48 jobs and eliminate 55 openings following federal pressure and a student’s exposé of Ivy League bloat.
“The layoffs at Brown prove that the message of Bloat@Brown has been true all along: many of these administrators were unnecessary in the first place,” Alex Shieh, a former student at Brown University, told Fox News Digital in a statement.
On Monday, Brown announced that it will lay off 48 positions and cut 55 unfilled budgeted positions, which the school said “will no longer be pursued following the end of Brown’s hiring freeze.”
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Shieh, a former student at Brown who was cleared of wrongdoing by the university in May, had previously angered officials by sending a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees identifying himself as a journalist for The Brown Spectator and asking them what they do all day to try to determine why the school’s tuition has gotten so expensive.
The Brown Spectator, a right-leaning publication which has a board of three people, including Shieh, was revived this year after it ceased publication in 2014.
The board members faced a disciplinary hearing on May 7 over allegations that they violated Brown University’s name, licensing and trademark policies.
Shieh and the Spectator came under scrutiny after he reviewed 3,805 non-faculty employees at Brown and emailed them asking, “What do you do all day?” in an effort to identify redundant positions.
“In recent years, Ivy League colleges have morphed into a bloated ‘educational industrial complex’ run by self-dealing administrators who charge families record tuition and divert the money to layers of staff that add little to the classroom,” Shieh told Fox News Digital. “The result has been an Ivy League that masquerades as a meritocracy while in reality predominately serving the richest Americans who can afford the $93,064 costs and fees.”
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Shieh, who told Fox News Digital that he dropped out of Brown and wants to remove the perception of the Ivy Leagues as being a gatekeeper to career opportunities and prove “one can be successful without an Ivy League degree, or a college degree at all,” said that Brown choosing to pare down on staffing should help students.
“The recent reduction in administrators is a victory for students, particularly those who are struggling to afford the crushing cost of attendance,” Shieh said. “But the fact that the bloat has persisted for so long is why Americans no longer trust elite institutions to serve their interests. It’s also why I dropped out of Brown this summer to found a venture-backed startup: to diminish the perception of the Ivy League as a gatekeeper to career opportunities by proving that one can be successful without an Ivy League degree, or a college degree at all.”
Shieh testified in June before the House Judiciary Committee about rising costs at elite universities.
A Brown spokesperson said the recently announced staffing cuts were necessary in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“The community message you’re citing and the August message that preceded it make the reason for these financial measures very clear: the need to offset expected losses in Brown’s budget from ongoing federal impacts,” the spokesperson said. “Those impacts include expected declines in federal research funding, the persisting threat of deep cuts to indirect cost reimbursements for research grants to higher education, and other federal policy changes will affect tuition revenue.”
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