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Comment by mattkrause | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

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