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Comment by pkaye | Hacker News Reader

In college, a professor recommended me for an academic award from industry. It was $1000. So I go to the yearly awards dinner and a month later got a check for $800. Apparently the university takes a 20% as administrative cost!

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That's actually low! Most of the Universities we've explored research grants with wanted 45-65% overhead for the university, then another 10-15 for Research organization, with the remainder sorted between the researchers / company. We found it was actually just cheaper to pay for the research ourselves and hire the students directly for part time work than go through the grant process.

I sat on a couple school boards for a while, all that was ever discussed was fund raising and how we should be contributing more. Very little focus on education. Sadly it's turned me off spending time with Schools and just targeting students / researchers directly.

> and just targeting students / researchers directly.

Sounds like a win-win, yeah? So, sorta happy ending...

To a large degree yes, but a lot of the work would have fared better with a larger pool of people to work on the problem. We have to be more selective in candidates and in turn, we spend more money out of pocket vs wider spread from the grant pool of cash. The original purpose of grants was to spur technology growth and acceleration, now they're just one more notch on the ole' funding universities piece.

We need an overhaul on bloat in state schools at a minimum, then we're good.

The other issue is patent / design ownership arguments, but that's for another day.

Imagine how this team[1] felt when the University of Florida screwed them over not only a $750K preliminary prize (that would have been applied towards funding the next year's research agenda) but a subsequent $2MM prize for taking 1st place in DARPA's Spectrum Collaboration Challenge.

[1] https://www.alligator.org/news/uf-engineering-team-wins-mill...

Seriously?

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