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Comment by yardie | Hacker News Reader

I wonder what percentage of the admin is dedicated to chasing money. While I was working as an undergrad assistant the grant writing process was insane and I rarely saw the professor overseeing research. He was walled off in his office writing grant proposals.

I learned that for the budget of most research projects, 50% was administration. That is 50% wasn't for researchers, the lab, labor, or equipment. Part of the 50% administration budget was paying for the oversight of said budget.

I am no longer amazed when government projects go severely overbudget anymore. Its designed to do that. Not just the contractor but the government itself. Budget a project, get the vendor, project goes over, create a department to track costs, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, budget goes over, create another department to track budget, budget goes over, write a new law to track budget, ad nauseum.

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In my experience (former PhD student and instructor and my spouse is a full-time faculty and program director), if you're a tenured faculty member at a R1 university, then grant writing is your job. You're expected to be self-funding and the only way to do this is to grind out grants and pass the work onto graduate students and staff. And, you pay a ~50% tax on your grant award as 'overhead' to the university, so you have a lot less money to work with than the sticker value that gets awarded.

At the university level, arguably the second most important person in the administration is the President of the Foundation and they don't even technically work for the university as the foundation is a separate legal entity. This person has a massive private army of fund-raising staff that shakes the alumni money tree looking for gifts large and small.

But, that doesn't mean that universities don't also have money chasers. My former uni had a special division in the recruiting/admission office that focused on high-value future alumni, aka, children of rich and famous parents. These kids were brought in for tailored events, private meetings with faculty and admins, and received a general red carpet treatment to try and lure them to the university.

Related, Malcom Gladwell has done some great work dissecting the money making machines of the administrator class who go after $100M+ gifts (far more money than 99.99% of researchers could acquire in a lifetime of grants). And, how this gift giving continues to pile on at elite schools while starving everyone else of gifts.

http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/06-my-little-hundred-...

I'm surprised more high-tier universities don't supply tenured PIs with dedicated grant writers, or at least easy access to them.

Many of my social circle work as grad students at a private R1 institution, and I've seen a vast difference in the experience of students with a PI who self-funds and writes grants all day - less interaction, most of the teaching and mentoring is done by postdocs - and a PI that has an alternate source of funding like clinical work - grants are still needed but less often, much more hands-on input to projects, much more direct mentoring. It seems like the top universities could definitely chip in to help ease that load on the researchers: science as a whole stands to benefit.

> I'm surprised more high-tier universities don't supply tenured PIs with dedicated grant writers, or at least easy access to them.

At least at my university, there were a few technical writers that would help out writing grants and papers. AFAIK they were underutilized. It may vary by field and from PI to PI, but, in general, PIs wouldn't accept anyone else's writing. Everything that was penned by a technical writer was rewritten.

> most of the teaching and mentoring is done by postdocs

Or (best of all, in my experience) some older tenured full professors that don't care about getting funding anymore (or funding is thrown at them because they're famous). A few professors in their late 70's would spend entire afternoons helping me get something to work.

That may be further evidence that the real drain on mentoring is the constant need to write grants. Sad that some really enjoyed mentoring younger people but they couldn't until they were about to retire.

> I'm surprised more high-tier universities don't supply tenured PIs with dedicated grant writers, or at least easy access to them.

Who would pay them?

Presumably they'd pay for themselves because the universities would bring in larger future grants, because the output would be increased, because the academic staff would be better utilized.

The amount of money the university got from those grants would be lower, though, because they'd have to pay the grant writers. That sounds bad. What if instead the professors just applied to larger grants and worked overtime? That's what they do right now, and it works.

Some of the Ivys take around 65-70 percent, and a few places (admittedly with very specialised facilities) are over 100%--spend a dollar on research, spend another (edit: had written two) on admin.

To be clear, a 60%-70% overhead rate implies that the university is taking 37-42% of the money (for each dollar spent, another 0.60-0.70 goes to university). In addition, other expenses like tuition and equipment have no overhead taken out.

Tuition/stipend for grad students and equipment most definitely has overhead, at least from my experience in the UC system.

Tuition is funny money though, it's money the university is charging itself for nothing. You pay tuition to take a 3 credit class that never meets, doesn't have an instructor, and has no assignments. It's just there to justify the $10k a semester or whatever the university wants to charge the grant. Grad students in CS at least are expected to provide their own equipment, also.

Sure, but it's almost always quoted as a rate like this.

Equipment is a special case in that "capital" equipment is usually exempt from most or all overhead. Smaller things are often not though, and some things are very difficult to charge to a grant at all.

This is wrong. 50% overhead means for every dollar in, an additional 50 cent "tax" is paid as overhead (thus, out of 1.50 total, 1.00 goes to the research, 0.50 to the overhead).

A cynic might think failure is success for them.

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