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