Hacker News Reader

Comment by whakim | Hacker News Reader

I would caution against such sweeping generalizations about where the money goes. Statistics usually show tremendous increases in spending on "staff" (i.e. non-faculty) salaries, but those staff do a variety of things. For example, I previously worked as a staff researcher at a big private university; my job involved building open source software and writing papers. The research center I worked at had a couple faculty members and PhD students but probably 20 folks with jobs like mine. The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."

View on HN

There are staff researchers, but at least at my university such people were mostly soft money and were responsible for bringing in their own funding, which the university then proceeded to take 56% off the top for overhead.

At any rate, their numbers were insignificant compared to the administration, which occupied numerous buildings, including an entire skyskcraper. They didn't help us, and in fact made our jobs more difficult.

I'd love to see the data on "insignificant compared to the administration," because it doesn't fit my actual experience in any way. (I'm not saying you're definitely wrong, but I hope you might slightly re-evaluate your priors here.) And no, many staff researchers don't bring in their own funding; like PhD students they're funded by a combination of the university and grants (which they often help write).

That's what I meant by "soft money." By administration, I am talking about more stereotypical bureaucracy, such as the ever-expanding number of various kinds of deans. I worked with soft-money people, who were called "research professors" in my department. They worked hard and brought in much more money for the university than they cost.

Thanks very much for clarifying. My original point was that these staff and their salaries are often lumped in with "stereotypical bureaucracy" when discussing administrative bloat, and I think they're a greater percentage than many people realize :)

In UC, grant overhead was 50% the last time I took. That’s money the administration takes out before the professor gets it. Staff researchers, equipment, students, etc come out of the other half. Assuming the professor is using 20% of their grant money on staff researchers (this is likely a high estimate), $5 is going to administration for every $1 spent on staff researchers.

Edit, also some admins are paid out of the professors’ budgets, after overhead is taken out.

Administration doesn't consist of the people at that lower level. The admins are the VPs, associate deans, vice provosts, assistant this and associate that. They draw in low to medium six digit salaries and recruit a bunch of people to assist them.

> The fact is, a lot of the research is being done by that so-called "bloated administration."

That's such bs! Admin have no time to read a single paper, forget about doing original research. Admins do exactly zero research.

> Administration doesn't consist of the people at that lower level.

This isn't the way "administration" is calculated. Statistics showing "administrative bloat" point to growth in spending on "staff"/"non-teaching employees"/etc. The job I describe above would have fit this definition of bloat.

The non teaching staff doesn’t come out of thin air. They are employed for the people in the administrative positions.

My experience (described above) provides a direct counterexample to this.

For example, if you want to use modern tools (aka code) in a department where nobody is hired for their coding skill, you need some staff. And you need to pay them well, because... you know. Startups, SF, FAANGs.

In scientific disciplines, professors and grad students just write their own code. At least that was the case in my department, other similar departments at my university, and people in my field from other universities. It's very bad code of course, but I've never heard of anyone getting hired specifically to program, besides a few CS undergrad interns being brought in. No one had anywhere near the kind of budget to hire professional programmers.

This is thankfully beginning to change, though far more slowly than many of us would like to see. There is much more talk about "research software engineering" happening in a lot of fields, and some funding agencies are beginning to take notice. Anecdotally, I know of a couple of PIs who have been successful in arguing for higher budget caps on R01 submissions in order to cover the costs of having appropriate computational staff on their grants, which is something that I never would have believed if somebody had told me about it ten years go. And some fields (like computational biology) have been ahead of the game in this regard.

It remains a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, though, I don't want to downplay that too much. And there are also other challenges- until very recently, my university didn't have job categories for software-related research staff roles, and so we had enormous difficulties figuring out how to hire and appropriately pay such people. The "how do we hire them" part has been fixed, which is a big help- but we still have to figure out how to pay for them ourselves.

And when it becomes a huge challenge from a budgeting standpoint, you need appropriate administrative staff to figure this out.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com