Brown University student asks non-faculty staff what they do all day after tuition skyrockets to $93K a year: A lot of hostile replies
A sophomore at Brown University is facing the school’s wrath after he sent a DOGE-like email to non-faculty employees asking them what they do all day to try to figure out why the elite school’s tuition has gotten so expensive.“The inspiration for this is the rising cost of tuition,” Alex Shieh told Fox News Digital in an interview.“Next year, it’s set to be $93,064 to go to Brown,” Shieh said of the Ivy League university.Brown’s website estimates the total charges to attend the school for the 2025-2026 school year is even higher at $95,984.“‘And I think that’s crazy,” he added.
“I don’t understand why it costs that much.And I never understood why it cost that much, but then I did some digging and I discovered that the reason why the price of college in general across the nation, but also particularly at Brown, has been rising over the past few decades.
Far outpacing inflation is because we’re adding on administrative staff faster than we’re adding students, faster than we’re having professors, administrators.” The total cost of attending Brown University for the 2019-2020 school year was $78,706.00, a 3.62% increase from the previous year.It’s risen steadily since then and is projected to be nearly $96,000 in the 2025-26 school year.Using AI during some free weekends in March from a common room in his dorm’s basement that routinely floods whenever it rains – making plastic tarps for the shared work and leisure space a necessity for a school that charges students around $90,000 per year -Shieh set out to determine what Brown employees did and why the school was so expensive. He formatted his site to identify three particular jobs: “DEI jobs, redundant jobs, and bulls–t jobs.” Shieh said he wanted to look into DEI because of President Donald Trump’s executive orders and his administration’s threatening to withhold federal funds to universities with DEI policies. Shieh created a database of the 3,8...