Hacker News Reader

Yes, the university taking 60-70% is almost highway robbery, but it is hard to completely disassociate from them. For one, the university can through economies of scale reduce the cost of setting up and running experimental facilities. Moreover, one usually finds motivated researchers in academic settings (I am anticipating dissent here, since that could be because of the funding flowing only through Universities). However talented and motivated researchers usually find other work situations which while to fully aligning to their erstwhile research interests, pay for a good life. Those who really have the passion that exceeds the mundane normalisation of drive ( also called life per some definition) usually seek refuge in the academic setting. So, yes if we can set up labs like the old Bell labs or find a way to replicate the tenure model of universities, taking funding away from the univ mechanism and giving it to individual unaffiliated researchers won't be practical. But even if that can be achieved, you have just replaced universities with a slightly different structure. Better option is to trim the fat and realign priorities at universities, which is also easier said than done. Cushy administrator jobs, student housing mansions with 5 star facilities, large stadium colosseum all should go.. But systemic reasons, societal perception, need to justify legacy admission all factor in here as strong headwinds.

Does anybody really know where the overhead money of top places end up ?

Some institutions (eg famous ones) have near 100% overhead. Overhead sounds reasonable for example to maintain IT and core facilities, but I have a suspicion that a lot of it is wasted in a black hole of unknown function generically labelled “admin”

Most of the overhead goes towards admins. But it is also important to remember that many universities have multi-billion dollar endowments. It's been explained to me that "I don't know what endowments are for" when I've pointed out that my (not top 10) university could indefinitely pay for all US student tuition (and 90% of foreign) on the interest of our endowment at a 5% yearly growth. So I'm still not sure what endowments are for considering that there are 15 schools with endowments that are over 1m/student. So yeah, I still have no idea what endowments are for.

https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/Endow...

In the us the size of endowment affects US News college rankings. So it’s not to be touched!

I'm not in the US, but from what it sounds like, the situation isn't much different where I live.

A surprising amount of overhead goes to employees in accounting who perform some black magic so that everyone on staff is payed by some combination of projects. Whether someone actually works on said projects is irrelevant of course.

100% seems reasonable for other businesses.

If I had a factory with 100 people assembling my product, or a sales team with 100 people selling it, I'd be quite happy to only budget for the cost of another 100 people to pay my rent and run my IT, payroll, accounting, janitorial services, maintaining my machinery...

I get the impression that modern universities have five or ten other employees for each teacher/researcher, which assuming everyone gets the same pay implies 500-1000% overhead, or subsidy from sources other than grants.

The problem is that they've created a whole hierarchy of useless deans and other admins to eat up all that overhead to justify it.

100% is a bit of an exaggeration. I’ve heard of one place with a 100% overhead rate and it was for something very specialized (marine research vessels, which probably do eat money). Everywhere else I know of is near 50 percent, and this includes “famous” places (Yale, McGill, MIT, Georgetown, etc).

The overhead rates are supposed to reflect the University’s actual costs and are negotiated with the government, so I suppose you could try to make a FOIA request for them.

Most universities have their negotiated Facilities and Administrative (F&A) rates posted online via their Sponsored Research Office. For example, Harvard charges a 68% indirect rate and Stanford about 58%. The public R1 institutions I’ve done business with charge 40-50%.

This doesn’t paint the whole picture though as sometimes additional overhead costs (eg. healthcare benefits) can be budgeted as Fringe Benefits for personnel working directly on the project. In that situation, the F&A rate would stack on top of those costs.

If this is true then the universities will win the grants anyways, so why not adopt my proposal?

(It's not, especially for disciplines like CS and math.)

If your proposal is to make all grant applications blind with respect to grant writer information, it is an idea that has a lot of unintended side effects. Firstly, not every field, in fact, most fields are not Math or CS by definition. It is certainly the most popular in this crowd, especially these days, but without proper facilities most of science cannot be done. So, making an application for grant anonymous, you have dramatically increased the risk of nothing useful coming out of the proposal. A talented independent grant writer (who may or may not be a great scientist) now has a much higher chance of getting the award. But if he doesn't have the ability to execute that great idea the project will fail. Most often idea is aspirational with no detail, the breakthrough comes in only during execution. Execution requires a team and facilities. This is why things like MURI (multi-univeristy-research-initiative) were created. Also, a lot of the grants are earmarked for early career researchers, without a lot of experience in proposal writing, which also will go away if the awards are anonymous. I am sure there are other points I am missing and also there may be ways to remove the shortcomings, but I don't see a clean and easy path forward with this.

As for math and CS, I am quite positive at least in Math most work is done by individual professors/post-docs/students without much involvement of grants. In fact, a lot of universities do reduce the overhead charged to purely intellectual pursuit with no major facilities usage kind of departments. Not sure all math or cs research will qualify for that because of the HPC requirements, but the option is out there. Universities as signals for funding and research success really appears to me like the best of a bad option set.

> So, making an application for grant anonymous, you have dramatically increased the risk of nothing useful coming out of the proposal

To me this sounds not as a critique of the proposed system, but rather defense of the current system.

Science is underpinned by the scientific method which essentially is "form hypothesis -> create controlled environment -> test hypothesis". I do not want to start debate around expected outcome rations, but negative result (hypothesis being false) is perfectly normal outcome of the scientific method. Current system tries to defend against rent seeking by being heavily biased towards positive outcomes. This encourages heavily incremental research, which a bit paradoxically can be also seen as rent seeking. Furthermore, it also encourages low quality science (like p hacking and similar stuff) and discourages publication of negative outcomes, possibly leading to hitting the same dead ends multiple times.

Blind grant proposals could reduce bias towards "past performance" decreasing ratio of positive results, and encourage "riskier", more brave hypotheses to be formed and tested.

Past performance as a metric in grant application encourages research optimization. Some may see this as a good thing, but it discourages early-to-mid career researchers (and even late in their careers) from pursuing something non-obvious. Safe science is more often than not optimization and edge case/condition testing.

I think you're missing the point. Negative results is not the issue. If your hypothesis involves NMR, you need access to an NMR machine to test it. Most people outside of a university don't have that and so would fail to execute.

Ok, apparently I did miss your point a bit.

However, your argument is still orthogonal to grant blindness itself. Mere affiliation with with research institution does not guarantee (although highly increases the likelihood, I can agree on that) access to certain research instruments.

This is the thing I have tried to explore in my previous comment. Current model practically revolves around researcher "fame" and grant board "knowing" their [lab's] ability to execute technical part of the research. This creates some perverse incentives. Naturally, grant boards become more inclined (consciously or not) to favor certain institutions and researchers, giving more grants, further increasing "competitiveness". Researchers become disincentivized to publish negative results and are incentivized to resort to data hacking and irreproducible science. This sure does give rise to the OP's mentioned Twitter prof or "trust me bro" science. There is much more politics in science than we publicly admit.

Current process does not actually evaluate grant proposal on technical ability to execute, this is left for institutions "underwriting" proposal. We could start evaluating technical ability regardless of whether grant applications are blind or not. If peer review meant "peers got roughly similar basic results in basic reproduction" instead of "someone in the field looked at the final draft" I guess we could have blind proposals with advantages of current system without its major political disadvantages.

I can agree that open process does help filter out researchers underqualified to do the research in question, but it does come at a certain cost. Ability to weed out underqualified teams does not necessarily require current process, i.e. this can be achieved by other means.

Just a slight clarification/correction/question: as far as I can tell, M in MURI is for multidisciplinary. That means the DoD is seeking interdisciplinary research (and maybe intra-university collaboration), not explicitly inter-university work -- is this correct?

There may be separate multidisciplinary initiatives, but "Multi" in MURI definitely stands for inter university initiatives. All the MURI grants I have seen (not many and long ago to be honest) were multiple universities and one area of research.

It’s “multidisciplinary”, but funded programs are almost always large multi-institutional teams https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/295323...

> At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments.

I think this is missing the forest for the trees. These aren't the reason schools cost so much and in turn why student debt is so high. Meeting with other scholars internationally has been happening for over a hundred years. European schools often travel to America a lot because conferences are often here, and their costs aren't what American universities are. Despite having similar levels of research output. The high cost is for other reasons. This also isn't why professors ignore their teaching requirements (find time to do both research, which is the higher priority, and teach. You sure can't in 40hrs)

As to the rest of the comment, I am in a lot more agreement with. I don't even think grad student pay needs to even be that high, it would just be nice enough if I didn't need to rely on internships for my cost of living. If I had enough money to pay off my undergrad loans instead of letting them rack up tens of thousands of dollars more.

But one thing I would highly argue, is that research is investing in your own country. Academia is a common place for innovation to be derived from. It is no surprise given you put a bunch of smart people together that are passionate about learning that they make new things. Especially considering how research is literal innovation. I think there's a large argument to be made about how this is a national security issue, and can be justification for diverting military budget for non-weapons based research. War is about economics after all. Really it is about a lot of things besides the actual fighting parts. Innovation has been a key element in America's (and many others) success. It is weird to think that we wouldn't place this as one of our highest strategic assets.

>> At the very least, tax payers need to stop bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments.

> I think this is missing the forest for the trees.

Not at all. People have a sense of right and wrong, and this fact offends them far more than the nebulous task of assess the effectiveness of research.

I have a PhD and spent a lot of time within and interfacing with academia. I think even the average science-skeptic congressperson massively over-estimates both the short-term and long-term value of the sort of research that happens in most of academia. But we're probably not going to agree on that.

So, see, we can go back and forth all day about the relative merits of academic research. And there's always cover because most congressional people -- let alone voters -- don't know enough to have a really informed opinion.

If I go to a congressional staffer and complain about the NSF or NIH, not much is going to change unless the candidate already agrees with me and is passionate about the issue. They know voters don't care.

But I can go to a congressional staffer and ask: why does your candidate support bailing out student loan debt while simultaneously funding multiple annual week-long conferences in Hawaii and Europe for professors who scoff at their teaching assignments?

And THAT question is going to be viewed very differently, because it's something that could anger voters who don't have the time and attention to vote on the basis of whatever useless crud the NSF is funding this year.

(former tenured prof here)

This is exactly right. Just like it's better to think of McDonald's as a real estate company with a food business on the side, these days it's better to think of big state schools as mechanisms for ingesting federal research dollars, with an education business on the side. (Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)

As an example, MIT spends about 16% of its revenue on undergraduates; undergrad tuition is about 14% of revenue.* Remarkably those percentages were about the same when I was an undergraduate there 40 years ago.

Basically MIT is an enormous government research lab with a small school bolted on the side. This was a deliberate structure thanks to James Conant and Karl Taylor Compton working for the government in WWII.

* honestly I’m astonished they are willing to run that minor (and by a lot of faculty reviled) operation at a small loss.

Interesting that you bring up WWII. There's a theory that says that US's big research funding agencies are deliberately set up the way that they are because the US government freaked the _fuck_ out upon realizing that a bunch of nerds could go from zero to nuclear bombs in ~10 years. So, these big bureaucracies were set up to, in effect, keep tabs on physicists. (I first heard of this from a talk from Kim Stanley Robinson of Red Mars fame, and more recently Ministry for the Future. It's on YouTube somewhere but it's a bit hard to find, it was a seminar he gave at Duke University some 15 years ago.)

Then, some 35 years later came the Bayh-Dole act, which however well-meaning it might have been, really provided the incentives for universities to turn into fed money capturing enterprises. The rest is history.

You don’t need a conspiracy theory — Compton and especially Conant were clear about the model they wanted to set up and why. It was well documented in memos, planning, and position papers.

This was before the Manhattan project was authorized.

Do you have a source for that cost attribution? Based on my time there (slightly more recent than yours), that breakdown feels roughly correct. However, I've been trying to find similar information and have found it difficult even for public universities.

The institution publishes its budget. 10 seconds of DDG search found this page: https://vpf.mit.edu/about-vpf/publications Looks like tuition is becoming less important over the Covid period and grad+ug is down to 9% of revenue.

They have a nice presentation with various charts and such which is where I get this info myself. I don’t know if it’s online. I forget how I got it when I was in school but now the people who come visit from the development office bring it with them because they know I’m interested.

>(Never mind that state schools shouldn't be education businesses _at all_, they should be _public services_)

But the education public services were long-since defunded so that states could cut their local taxes and "attract business".

Specialization is the greatest source of efficiency.

Almost every organization has more people in support roles than in line positions. If not directly, then indirectly. If the "overhead" is not high enough, the people who are supposed to do line work have to waste their time as incompetent janitors and secretaries. That's a very common situation in universities, which employ many administrators for regulatory reasons but often don't have the money to hire enough support personnel.

If you want to pay grad students $100k, then the grant must be $165k. Or maybe $180k to allow the grad student to focus more on their research. Maybe the sum can be a bit less, if you manage to reduce the regulations and reporting requirements. But then you have to accept that a larger fraction of grant recipients will misuse the money or spend it on research many taxpayers would consider frivolous.

In CS this is just false. Nearly all of the CS research we fund could be done in inexpensive office space with no administrators. The one exception is DARPA-funded robotics research, and even then it's only a subset.

In wet lab disciplines the story is more complicated. But there are many possible configurations that are more efficient than the current university-as-gatekeeper system.

You can do many kinds of research with minimal overhead, as long as everyone is self-employed and your funding comes with minimal restrictions and reporting requirements.

I did that for a couple of years as a CS postdoc on a private grant. I believe my overhead rate was 15-20%, which was mostly health and other insurances. To reach that, I did accounting and taxes on my own. I also had a loose affiliation with a university, so I didn't have to pay for office space or computing.

If you start using paid services, hire employees, and accept more restrictive grants, your overhead rate can easily climb above 50%.

It's not just in academia: I've worked on lots of scientific and technical grants for industry: https://seliger.com/2017/03/28/write-scientific-technical-gr..., and the RFPs often indicate a need to claim all sorts of things. Cure cancer! Lead to the complete end of fossil fuel reliance! Revolutionize computing!

At the same time, few applicants, or applications, seem to be punished for grandiose, but not completely impossible, claims. Grant making follows the golden rule: https://seliger.com/2007/12/06/studio-executives-starlets-an...: he who has the gold, makes the rules.

This is sort of what NGI Zero is doing, mostly via NLNet:

https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html

https://www.ngi.eu/ngi-projects/ngi-zero/

They're an insignificantly-tiny fraction of EU research funds, but I'm shocked how often I come across an outstanding project (nix, chips4makers, betrusted, libresoc, searx, OTR, osmocom, qubes, sourcehut, wireguard) that they funded.

Whatever awesomeness the NSF had in the 1970s-1980s died somewhere in the mid-1990s, and appears to have been reincarnated with these guys.

IMO, we need to regulate online advertising. By allowing advertisers to fund websites and apps, we allow them to be used as platforms for mass hype and dissemination of "junk" (bait).

The "Twitter prof" is the academic who has learnt to master the advertiser-funded hype machine.

The internet should be an advertising-free internetwork as it once was.

Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding.

When we fail regulate so-called "tech" companies, we watch the value of the internetwork continually degraded to nothing more than a means to advertise and disseminate "junk".

This is a commercial website and the advertiser funding it is called Y Combinator. It advertises its own VC business and posts launch ads / job ads for its funded companies here.

The rise of the Twitter Prof has nothing to do with Twitter’s funding model.

"Advertiser-funded" as used here means the income from advertising is necessary for the continued existence of the website.

Companies advertising open position on HN do not pay for the ads. HN does not rely on imcome from ads to run the website.

(Now, one could argue that HN is owned by YC, YC makes money from "tech" companies and "tech" companies generally use online ads or ad services as their "business model". Fair enough. In response, I would point out that HN does not need surveillance, data collection or ads in order to survive. HN's "content" comes from from submitters and commenters. These individuals are unpaid. Unlike sites run by "tech" companies, the users generating the "content" are not paid from online advertising revenue.)

> Everyone reading this comment and enjoying this forum is using a non-commercial website. There is no advertiser funding.

HN has advertisements and is part of a .com (Ycombinator).

This is happening in europe too, perhaps more, given that EU agencies dont care much about the long-term impact of work beyond the reporting requrements. PR-savvy people are guaranteed a stream of funding by virtue of their prior funding.

I think the whole idea of small-grant-based funding in academia has outgrown its usefulness. Just pay people directly and let them work on whatever they like.

DARPA is already very willing to fund work outside of academia. Every meeting I’ve been to has included consortia led by a big company like HRL Labs or Teledyne as well as smaller companies, sometimes even 1-2 person shops, that work in the particular field. The overhead rates at those big companies are massive though.

> if we pay grad students $100K instead of paying them $35K

That would make a big difference I think. Especially in fields where private sector pay much more. That being said, research remains attractive for the brightest minds and there's no shortage of great candidates yet.

I'm not an expert on the German research landscape, but I think it works a bit like that there, that the big shots work at Max Planck, Helmholtz,... institutes. Would be funny if the US followed Germany there, since the current academic/research setup in the US was basically imported from Germany in the early 20th century.

Somewhat related to this is Kardashian Index [1]

[1] the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashian_Index

Is higher education anything more than a parasitical industry that takes whatever money is given to it from government, military and corporations, in order to return whatever studies are requested?