What does a research grant pay for? | Hacker News Reader

What does a research grant pay for?

austinhenley.com

133 pointsazhenley101 comments

One of the biggest problems with overheads is that administrators are frequently simply unable to explain or justify them.

The vast majority of research-active universities in the US are non-profit, and so it doesn't really make sense to say that the universities is "profiting" off of overheads. Overheads are also negotiated with each funding agency, and my understanding is that the university has to prepare a fairly detailed case to support their particular number. They can't just make something up.

But overhead rates can vary fairly significantly between similar institutions. And when, as a faculty member, you start asking questions about why, you're frequently met with defensiveness, nonsense, or both. When I worked in the Northeast, I remember someone claiming that our overheads were 10+% higher than another institution due to... snow removal. (Which wasn't that effective either.)

Overheads also seem to only go up. Because of course.

Provide a reasonable justification for why you're charging me a certain amount, and how the money gets spent, and we're cool. I understand the university is a complex place and there's a lot involved in supporting what I'm doing. But when you can't provide a reasonable explanation, people start to wonder why not.

> Overheads also seem to only go up

Inflation says hello

Overhead is $ of overhead of $ per grant, so this isn't inflation, it's a higher proportion of grants going to admin vs research.

Significantly higher than inflation, too.

I mean, on a per grant basis, the direct costs (and thus indirects) for a non-modular NIH R01, which is probably the most common form of grant, haven't changed since the Clinton era.

I'm perplexed what the problem is here?

My partner works in grant management for a public r1. I believe the rate the university gets is about .57.

That pays for facilities and education programs and funding the department itself. Bringing in money makes the university happy and your pay check bigger though the accounting on it sounds obnoxious and not always guaranteed (salary cuts to cover overruns, etc).

However if you think about it, That's probably about how much private employees make for their employer anyways if not more. Annoying but hey that's the way the system is, you're getting paid to make someone else more money.

> I'm perplexed what the problem is here?

It sounds like there is a large potential for corruption and waste with such an opaque system.

You've just described capitalism, for better or worse.

Not really.

Though researchers love to buy big expensive sample fridges or other equipment when they're ending a project and need to spend anything left over in the projects funds.

Is that waste to you?

I was referring to the "overhead" portion, which it sounds like the researchers are not able to access.

So?

Either spending is wasteful or it isn't. People don't work for free and the money is accounted for.

For example the Federal government and public universities negotiate a rate at which F&A (overhead, facilities and administrations) can be at. Then the Federal government, since they're paying for it, ask for receipts. The money is being accounted for.

From the perspective of a grad student, you're getting paid $20k/year in a HCOL area, the grant is getting charged like $40k a year (somewhere around $20k of "tuition remission" charged on fake tuition that nobody actually pays), and then the government is actually paying $60k/year due to overhead. This is frustrating.

Where's that extra $40k going?

I had a small desk in a shared office and I guess used some electricity for my computer, and there was custodial staff who cleaned that building. That's about all I can think of, and I don't think it cost the university $40k/student/year.

Campus amenities were paid for by a $600 mandatory fee which came out of my paycheck separately.

It's not paying for compute -- the computing resources I used were bought separately through grant money. If it was paying administrators, then how come every time I needed to do something it had to go through the same handful of extremely overworked people?

You could see where people would start to get annoyed.

Minor note: Tuition isn't typically included in the "base rate" for overhead calculations.

Agree, it's complete crap. Until COVID, my faculty used to charge monopoly money for grad student tuituion fees (which is to say, these costs were always waived provided the candidate had good grades and funds could be found for a living stipend). Since COVID, we now charge many tens of thousands per candidate per year. Why? grad students cost SFA in terms of additional overheads and they are the folks who do the actual "work" that brings grant ideas to fruition. Its not like (undergrad) student numbers are down vs pre-COVID times either nor is there some huge sudden influx of graduate student.

It is worse than that. You get paid 20k/y. You pay 20k/y in tuition. But only 40% of the grant money ends up going to this 40k. So it costs the funding institution $100,000 to pay you 20k.

"That pays for facilities and education programs and funding the department itself."

Buildings, rooms costs rent from each department.

Departments have expenses. Salaries to pay. Equipment to upgrade. Sometimes costs go over or researchers suddenly leave for whatever reason. The department they worked in is holding the bag on that.

Literally all that .57 or whatever part of every of every dollar you bring is going to the university to do with it how they like it. You're always working to make someone else more; that's why they hired you.

Now why is it going through the same people all the time (like grant management I presume?), Because grants have limited amount of money and people that fund research like to know the money was spent the way it was supposed to and the university itself likes to know all the money its researchers are bringing in and avoid conflicts of interest.

Edit: I also forgot to include, don't forget that like part of your pay you don't directly see, it's a about a third more, which goes to your benefits.

> I'm perplexed what the problem is here?

...

> Annoying but hey that's the way the system is

Wut? First, why the self contradiction. If it is annoying then there is a problem, that point of annoyance.

And keep in mind, as also pointed out elsewhere, this is not how it is everywhere.

You might be content with the situation (which is understandable, as your wife gets her pay by it), but that does not mean there are no issues are that's how it is.

That's how it is in the bigger world outside of academia... Why would it be any different?

If you want to make the full value of your work then become your own boss. Though as others in the parent thread pointed out businesses cost about .5 or so for every dollar you make.

So it's either suck it up and accept that's how our society is structured and it happens to be an annoying aspect of it. Or we try redesigning society and discover different annoying problems/issues.

> are non-profit, and it doesn't really make sense to say that the universities is "profiting" off of overheads

IMO “non-profit” is a misnomer.

It only implies that the organisation’s owners (funders, equity holders, etc) do not take a profit.

It does /not/ mean that the people involved don’t make money - income, fees, admin overhead, building/contracts/employment favoritism, etc. There are infinite ways to leech money that don’t involve taking “profits”.

It's literally what the company setup means. You can allege that people in every non-profit are committing fraud, but it's not a misnomer.

A better way to phrase the parent's frustration is to say that "non profit" is strictly a tax status.

Colloquially, we have expanded the meaning to mean a charity or other selfless endeavor.

No doubt many non profits do perform charitable acts, but plenty more are just glorified tax shelters.

Overhead is why your institution wants you to apply for grants, of course.

Note the particularity of not paying professors over summer is only true for the USA. In Germany, for example, you will get 13 monthly salaries for 12 months of work (the extra one is in November and helps one to pay for Christmas presents). What really matters in the end is one´s quality of life for the annual net salary, of course.

Thanks for uploading some sample documents - interesting to see how they look like in the US.

It should be noted its not even universally true in the USA. I've never had to cover summer salary. It's always been a question of a hard vs. soft money percentage. Often one where just having to cover somewhere between 0 and 3 months would have been enviable.

Ha, I didn't know it can differ.

You would think professors are smart enough that they would have created a salary comparison website where you can compare countries and universities by salaries and benefits, alas this has not been done.

Worse, as my wise (accountant) wife points out, "What do you get for all this peer reviewing work? Nothing! Just wasting our family weekend to make publishers rich!"

What I can say is in Europe, Ireland and Switzerland have rather good salaries for academics. German professors mostly get the same prescribed salary from a table based on level (W2 or W3) and seniority: https://www.academics.de/ratgeber/gehalt-professor-was-verdi...

Faculty pay rates at most (if not all) state universities are publicly searchable. I ended up using that at least once during a salary negotiation.

This is an excellent breakdown. The one thing I would quibble with is the characterization of summer salary. It's better to think of the 9-month pay idea as an accounting trick that has two purposes: 1. A benefit for faculty, since they get to be paid extra if they get grants. 2. An accounting approach for the NSF to limit how much any one faculty member can get in grant funding and account to Congress that the faculty are actually participating in the research. It does, as the article says, create the possibility of significant swings in compensation, similar to a bonus scheme.

That's true in engineering and other grant-heavy fields. In other fields, where administrators care about tuition dollars, faculty can teach in the summer (and of course, get paid more). Summer grant money is supposed to be an incentive to choose research over teaching, consulting, and taking a vacation.

An important point to understand, though, is that taking a vacation for the entire summer is not really an option, no matter how few grants you have. You're expected to do more than that over the summer even though supposedly you aren't paid for it.

This varies a lot from faculty to faculty and from position to position. Some will work nonstop regardless of how many grants they have. (If you have grants, use them; if not, write them.) For pre-tenure research faculty, behaving this way is pretty much expected.

Others who are more senior and less research active may shoo their students off to internships (particularly in CS) and spend the summer doing very little. A lot of departmental committee work is paused, and people tend to know who is and is not available over the summer and will make arrangements accordingly. (I.E., don't assign Professor Tee Time to a committee that needs to function over the summer.)

For fields like mathematics (my field), where grants can be gotten but aren't that big, and people value time more than money, most of us would forgo the summer salary if we didn't have a grant. It's useful to have the extra income, to be sure, but not having it doesn't break the bank for most people. I did go to fewer meetings when I didn't have a grant, and graduate students working with me would have to TA more. (Math Depts depend on tuition dollars and usually have TAships for anyone who wants one, unlike fields where there are big grants but also teach fewer undergrads.)

It's also extremely hard to generalize even in grant-heavy fields based on source.

The NIH and the CDC don't even really have a conception of summer salary, and often cover way more salary than NSF grants do.

Framing this as a benefit/incentive is incredibly disingenuous. Note that no businesses, not even Silicon Valley, do this. To be clear: this is 75% of an expected salary (for a leadership position).

>>> A very stressful part of faculty life was knowing that my annual compensation was about to take a nose dive if I don't get another grant.

>>> ... What do you do if you're swimming in funding then? You can buy out of teaching. You effectively pay for the cost of an adjunct to take your teaching load.

Indeed, people think that getting tenure means you can live on easy street, but a tenured prof with no funding is living a tough life. They can lose their research space and department-contributed equipment funding (if in a laboratory science, these can be significant), and travel money, plus get "stuck" with a heavy teaching load. At the same time, a prof who does want to focus their career on teaching pays a price for doing so.

A professor who wants to focus on teaching should probably not be working at a research university, depending on his/her field.

Indeed, and that will happen anyway.

This a decent write up. The SBIR budgets wind up looking similar.

I can see how the indirect costs ("overhead") seem like ripoff to a professor, but even if you are running a private business having an indirect cost rate of 50% is considered low-to-normal. At least where I am: rent, utilities, cleaning, bathrooms, etc... are just expensive.

IMHO it's outrage-bait from an AI researcher who is likely oblivious to the costs of the computing infrastructure they use and thinks the overhead being charged on top of the grant award is outrageous because they don't have lab space and such.

Sadly, most researchers have zero appreciation for how much computing infrastructure costs, and how they think it's perfectly fine to store data for a several million dollar research grant, that involves multiple people's academic careers, on a USB hard drive they got at Best Buy because buying a proper server etc would cost too much.

You can see their attitude in how outraged they seem to be about having to pay a grad student $46k a year...

I only paid my students $26,000 a year (listed as $2200 a month in the post). I wish I could have paid them many more times that like they deserve!

If you are a CS researcher, the chances are the computing infrastructure you need is very cheap. If you only develop algorithms and software, your computing requirements are probably an order of magnitude smaller than for people who use the stuff you developed in their research. And even your data is often just something you downloaded from a public source, because you needed something with the right combinatorial and statistical properties.

they don't pay the grad student $46k a year. they pay them $24k a year (or more likely $20k for 9 months), and then the university makes up a number for "tuition" and takes an extra $15k arbitrarily.

I think one reason indirect costs get a bad rap is there are supplies that can only be paid for through overhead for example ... pens. Depending on the institute, getting anything back in terms of support can be tricky or down right impossible. It was so bad in one place, that we would all go out of pocket for notebooks and pens because the indirect portion was a black hole of nonsupport.

The problem with indirect costs is that it's well documented that the actual costs to the university are less than the amount received from grants. So the university is profiting in a very real sense. This has been written about by former federal agency heads and so forth and so on. Comparing costs to private businesses isn't quite right because some of those costs aren't actually borne by the university, they're done in house, they otherwise get discounts, or they're already covered by other income streams (to a certain extent you get into double charging for the same thing really fast).

You can intuit it just by how it's distributed, as a percent of grant funding. This really doesn't make sense, it's not tied to a line item budget or anything.

The problem with this is that it creates a perverse incentive for faculty to bring in large grants monetarily speaking, rather than to do good science per se. It's one of the reasons for the pyramid scheme we've seen over the last couple of decades at least, and part of the problem with how academics is incentivized.

Indirect costs should be cut completely IMHO (speaking as someone in academics, who has had tenure, and been involved in grants). Yes it will be painful but maybe then there can be a real conversation about what's going on in academics and how people are rewarded. Maybe things should be line item budgeted, maybe universities should just receive a lump sum in exchange for certain practices, maybe states should actually fund public universities in line with what they want them to do, I have no idea but right now the system is broken.

I'd be interested to see the data for unis showing their costs are lower. I doubt it.

For private companies, and an SBIR ,you have to establish an indirect rate based on your actual costs. The rate is the ratio of all indirect costs for the company vs the direct costs for the project (salary times the % of the person's time). It's a bit of work the first time you have to do it.

I'd be surprised if the NSF lets the uni just put whatever they want down and it isn't based on submitted budget data.

At the US university where I worked the indirect rate for federal grants was the same across the entire university, and I think it was slightly more than the 53% OP pays. I don't know where the number came from. Most of our industrial grants had language in the contract that said they would pay whatever rate the government was paying.

No data for it, but several times we've told companies if they think it can be done cheaper elsewhere for the same quality that they should do that.

We've had no takers.

Heck, one of my major sources of consulting income is "Checking the math a private industry research group did."

At my university when you look at it as a whole, we barely break even on indirects.

While there is a lot of need to have a conversation about how the system currently functions, I'd suggest cutting indirects completely as step one is akin to suggesting flooding the room with carbon monoxide until we can sort out that nasty cough you have.

Why doesn’t the university apply for indirects via a separate grant?

It seems weird to tuck it into the research grants. More professors with a research grant do not automatically translate to more indirect costs (e.g. the building has to be cleaned, whether a room is occupied or not)

It is at least intended to reflect the cost of the grant. The building might need to be cleaned, but one could expect things like the library, a laboratory, support folks in IT and grant administration, the IRB, etc. to go up.

In addition there is a world wide trend that the ratio of administrative vs academic staff keeps on increasing, in other words less and less people bring in the money (via teaching/research) that sustains the university. Hence the overheads go up, because those people need to be paid.

Even more infuriating is that when processes get reformed/changed it almost always ends up such that the work of admin gets easier at the cost of academic workload (because academics typically don't have set hours and just do the work until its done). To give 2 examples, at a previous uni there was always a lot of buerocracy about putting marks into the system (lots of paperwork, especially if there was some accidental mistake so a mark had to get changed). So during the end of the semester the uni forbid admin staff to do overtime for cost reasons, however the work still had to get done, so academics were doing the admin work as they were not on a fixed working time.

Second, at my current uni, when getting travel reimbursements, we are required to fill out an online form, scan all receipts and print out a generated form and send the form and original receipts to finance. So academics end up spending time scanning and printing documents that could just as well be done by a person at the finance.

> The problem with this is that it creates a perverse incentive for faculty to bring in large grants monetarily speaking, rather than to do good science per se.

And it creates a straight-forward incentive to do good science to so grantors give you big grants.

I think this is the biggest thing. Universities have to report all of these things separately - private industry gets to tuck it into things. Having seen the comparative rates for private research companies...they're not cheaper than universities. Not by a long shot.

Before I read the article, my first reaction was "People. Research grants pay for people('s salaries)." (And other things as well, but that's usually the biggest category)

But apparently, in the author's university, a massive amount of goes to "overhead". That's quite surprising, in my opinion.

It is the norm in the US. I'll share a few other overhead rates at well-known universities:

- University of Tennessee, Knoxville (my former employer), 53%

- University of Michigan, 56%

- University of California, Berkeley, 57%

- University of Texas at Austin, 58.5%

- Harvard University, 69%

UIUC - 58.6%

One thing that really annoys me as a grad student is the fact that the University charges tuition to my advisor even if I'm not taking any classes. Most PhD students finish their course work pretty quickly and don't take any classes after that and yet they get charged for tuition from the grant. The justification is that they're enrolled in thesis credits which is also a class but that's stupid imo, especially when the grad students don't get paid much. It's even more annoying when people say "oh your pay as grad student is low because technically you are getting free tuition.". Yeah no, I'm getting free tuition for like a year or two I take classes while I'm working there for 5 years.

I also wish the funding agencies allowed more flexibility is terms of spending excess money in different categories. I was surprised to know that left over money from a grant that's supposed to pay for an an undegrad cannot be used to buy a faster computer for research related to the same project or maybe even pay for data labeling services like scale.AI. They wanted us to hire a much more expensive undegrad instead of using external data labeling services at much cheaper prices.

Oh and also Fly America Act. Every federal grant requires you to use US airlines and I sometimes paid 2x what I would have paid otherwise (and only one of the author could do instead of 2 because of limited money).

Yea it's BS. I'm getting charged tuition (which is waived) while getting paid a 50% FTE contract as a graduate researcher yet I spend 100%+ time in the lab on research. So they're saying that they're charging me for that other 50%+ time I guess? Sure, they can call it dissertation work, some of it isn't directly on the grant I'm under but that's still messed up IMO. Some other students in my lab are there every weekend.

I really think that after the first two/three years there should be a system converting PhD students to an official researcher title, which is what they essentially are. Credit hours for thesis research, most of which is publishable and usually for some grant, is just BS, and even worse it helps justify the fact that one must work 20 hours per week while spending extra unpaid time for fulfilling the thesis research credit.

Both the university where I got my PhD and the university where I'm at right now have mechanisms to reduce your tuition to very, very near 0 (usually whatever is the minimum number of credits) once you pass your prelims.

Waived tuition for PhD students is such BS and a clear tax loop hole that universities can increase their costs artificially (they get to pick tuition). I always told my peers that universities would treat PhD students very differently if they actually paid the full payment to the student via 1099 who could then claim the cost as a business expense.

The 50% FTE I think is heavily intertwined by the fact that international F1 students are not allowed to work more than 20 hours. You could have a 2 tier system for domestic vs. international students but that would cause a clear schism in the student population. Regardless, there is the very real problem that a huge part of PhD is indeed training. In my department, it was very real that your "non-training" hours looked something like 0/25/50/75/100 across the years. Basically, nothing in the first 2 years, taking courses and maybe helping a bit on the side then finishing the last year writing and publishing a lot of stuff and training the new PhDs. It averages to 50% and I think is generally fair from that regard that the university did not hire you as a 100% researcher out of the gate.

Harvard. Nice

I remember recalling medical centers being different (can’t remember better or worse, but at least the salary was)

From what I heard, Columbia will be even higher than Harvard. The cost of a PhD student is ~100k/yr (salary + tuition + overhead). Postdocs are more expensive.

Except if you look at university budgets you’ll see that most of that overhead ends up paying for…that’s right. People.

Right, there are a lot of administrators, janitors, technical support staff etc being paid by the university. But I'm surprised they aren't paid by the students tuition fees, since are so ridiculously high already.

There a too many administrators imo, who are often paid quite a bit. I don't think a University needs so many associate deans, assistant deans, and directors. Unfortunately it's people in those roles that make future hiring decisions so minimizing spending there isn't usually their goal.

Student tuition is high but not a high part of the budget. 40 years ago tuition was mostly covered by the state and tuition charged to students was basically just a copay to ensure you weren't terrible. But since the end of the cold war there's basically been a one way ratchet: every time a recession hits the states cut uni funding to balance the budget, the unis raise tuition to compensate, and when the recession is over this now the new normal.

The immediate question that would come from that is why is a technician or grant admin paid off tuition, when a student will never benefit from that?

That also doesn't account for things that don't "feel" like your typical university but are major research centers, like medical schools, where a lot of faculty are purely research.

this is true for every gov't grant! And it's always 20%+ at EVERY university

Overhead is basically rent. You might think that a university rolling in with donations and names on buildings wouldn't need to charge rent but:

1. Nobody donates for upkeep. Not a huge market for the "jdiez17 memorial janitorial closet" if you know what i mean. 2. Endowment spending is typically limited to 4 percent, and often less. And often restricted in what it can be spent on.

Administrative overhead basically allows the university to convert its fixed assets into flexible spending on their basic needs that donations won't cover. Also: overhead is limited by law, unless your university has a grandfathered exception.

Overhead also pays for people.

When I was in grad school my PI was in the process of retiring. I’ll never forget what he said when I asked home how he felt to be retiring. He said he was so happy to not be funding himself through soft money anymore. He said that finding yourself through grants for 30+ years was exhausting, and that it’s only become harder to do over time.

After that experience I realized I’d never work in Academia, and this post solidified that feeling. There is just to much bull to deal with, especially when you aren’t tenured

Why don't grant funders apply a single overhead % to all recipients, so that those who are more efficient and productive with their funds benefit for it? The way it is now, you're almost incentivizing those who are inefficient / expensive to get more so because you're rewarding them with more $.

This is also why cost plus contracts are a disaster for governments, and the US is moving away from them slowly.

Because different institutions have different needs. As a particular example, the Scripps Institute has an astonishingly high, >100% overhead rate, because in order to do their research, they need to be able to maintain research ships. Which are, unsurprisingly, very expensive.

Edit: Per the post below, this is incorrect - don't remember where this information lives in my head. But the general point remains the same - because different institutions will have different costs.

Should large capital expenditures like that be funded as explicit parts of the grants that use them (like an amortized user fee), or as items requesting funding on their own? You would think such things would deserve their own approved budgets (for the funders) and not be absorbed into a hard-to-dissect overhead factor.

The problem for large capital expenditures is they will last well beyond the grant, but they need to exist in order for the grant to be done. But a lot of funders don't want to pay for things that will last well beyond the project they're paying for. Indirects are one way to do this. Large capital acquisition grants are another.

Actually, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography has indirect costs of 55%, in spite of the four research vessels that it maintain. [1][2]

In contrast, the Scripps Research Institute, a La Jolla neighbor with no ships, has indirect costs that were estimated at 89.5% in 2014. [3]

[1] https://scripps.ucsd.edu/cimec/resources/pre-award-informati...

[2] https://scripps.ucsd.edu/ships/scripps-fleet

[3] https://datahound.scientopia.org/2014/05/10/indirect-cost-ra...

Happy to be corrected.

Yes, that matches well my experience with NSF (in astrophysics). Most goes to the University in overheads + grad student + (maybe) postdoc, and a little bit to cover your summer salary (which is an insane concept if you ask me).

There is a reason university administrative overhead has exploded over the past few decades: MBAs have found yet another vein of money to parasite themselves onto. I think this country will only start to get better when 90% of this management overhead is fired and forbidden to work in management ever again.

>> a little bit to cover your summer salary (which is an insane concept if you ask me).

It's a brilliant concept though if you look at it another way.

Imagine the university has $120k per year allocated to your salary. Is it better for them to pay you 10k a month for 12 months, or 20k a month for 6 months?

You're seeing this as "they should pay you 20k a month for 12 months", but that option is not on the table (your post pays 120k).

By paying you 120k over say 9 months, they set your-value- at 160k. So you're free to get extra grant money, consulting gigs, whatever. For grant purposes they're capping your income at 160k,not 120k.

If you do "whatever" in your summer months, you won't get tenure. After tenure, yes it can work like you say.

I should write one of these for biology, it's quite different when a single experiment costs $50,000

Overhead is still outrageous though.

In Europe (or at least in Sweden) you can't keep any of the money; your salary is the same with or without grants, for good or bad. In my university they stuff you up with an ungodly amount of teaching so you get desperate for external money to buy yourself out of it, not sure if it's the same elsewhere (if it isn't, please hire me).

In the U.S. it varies by university, and even department. For some, it's hard to buy out teaching obligations, etc.

One university I interviewed you would effectively get a raise if you brought in more than you needed to cover with your salary, because they were desperately trying to revive a fairly stagnant research culture. At my current institution, it comes back to me (mostly) as unallocated funding.

It pays for the zoo keepers.

Research is basically like Jurassic Park : With schools people self select and you store the monsters you don't want in society on a remote island that you call university. You have them play stupid budget, ego and fame games among themselves while you give them scraps for working themselves to exhaustion.

The value of the research produced gets directed to the private sector, which will then happily contributes to the grants that buy them yachts.

Since the Manhattan project, we all know that you shouldn't put too many big dinosaurs in the same enclosure, otherwise they can't be contained and wreck havoc in the world.

Letting small dinosaurs roam freely in the world is the Park's latest experiment called "Open Source Software", where you let people feed the small monsters, it makes them happy, and you don't even have to pay for containment and food.

Canadian university here it’s between 15-25%. Which we often negotiated down to 15% or didn’t pay at all if the grant agency required no such fees. Secondly, students still pay tuition even though they got stipend from grant. So the uni still made some money from the whole thing.

That's intense overhead rates. EU Research Grants typically come with 25% I believe. That rate is set by the funding agency and not negotiable (and rates have not gone up since I have been involved).

That said, I don't get the hand wringing over this. This seems to be between funding agency and the university. You write a proposal for what you need and then you add a random number on top. Unless you're constraint by a maximum amount you can request why care?

One of my recent grants for comparison. I'm a computational epidemiologist. Like the OP, I'm effectively on a 9 month appointment, but for me it's 75% for all 12 months. Tenured at an R1 institution.

This is an NIH grant, and a little weird, because it's supposed to heavily fund my lab - the nearest analogy I can come up with is a CAREER award for the NIH. It is in total over the five years of the grant a $1.8 million grant.

Overhead: ~ $575K. The NIH, and CDC, list their grants as the "direct" costs of the grant, and then indirects are added on top based on the institutional rate. While it is on occasion an HN boogeyman, this rate is pretty reasonable IMO for what it covers, which ranges from helping support new faculty seed grants to paying for the IT person currently trying to solve a problem I'm having. The rate on my grants vary from 0% (usually charities) up to our standard rate which is 53%.

Protip: If you want to fund university researchers, but don't want to pay "full fat" indirects, as long as you have that stated somewhere clearly that researchers can point to, institutions will usually go along with it.

My Salary: This grant covers 51% of my salary and benefits like insurance for all five years for about $335K. The astute among you will notice that I'm covering more than I have to. This grant mechanism requires that I do so, and at my university, most of the difference comes back to me as unallocated funding I can spend fairly flexibly, so it's nice to bank it. This varies by department.

A Postdoc: ~$270K for all five years. I will probably use some of the unallocated funding from above to shore this up, because postdocs are getting more expensive, and I use the unallocated funding for things like relocation bonuses (I have to do that on my lab's dime)

Two Grad Students: ~$434 for all five years. A little under a third of this is tuition, which does and does not make sense depending on where the student is in terms of their progress. We have to support our students after their first year, and in the 2nd and 3rd year, despite their desires to the contrary, they're taking enough classes where I think it makes sense.

Important notes: If they go ABD, they can get a waiver for this, and I can spend the money elsewhere. Also, tuition doesn't factor into how much the grant is for overhead, to prevent the obvious game-ability of raising tuition on grad students to juice overhead rates.

Data Access: My lab depends on other people's data. This costs money - either buying it outright, deferring their costs, etc. I put in about $100K over the entire life of the grant to support this.

Open Access Fees: $24K in Open Access fees, because (especially as a public health research group) I think people should be able to access my work, but someone has to pay for it. This is on the expensive side, because a couple of our target journals are spendy.

Computing: $22K, which was intended to pay for two new cluster nodes. This is laughably too little to do that - the price of those has gone way up. This will cover one, or two if I want to use some of the funding from other categories (or that unallocated bit) to cover it. But they are very cool machines, and given my lab works on stochastic simulation, sensitivity analysis, and simulation based inference techniques (particle filter MCMC, Approximate Bayesian Computation, etc.) we get a lot of use out of them.

Laptops: $12K, anticipating needing to buy some equipment for grad students and postdocs.

Travel: $8K a year for conference travel. This usually covers me and the students on the grant for ~ 2-3 conferences a year. Lower side if its clinical conferences or international, higher if it's mostly methods stuff.

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So that's it. And this is, as mentioned, a grant that aggressively funds my lab. There are lots of NIH grants that have tons of consortium partners, do field work, etc. I tend to be added onto those, rather than be the PI on them.

Some researchers also love to spend grant money on the newest Mac that government money can buy. Even if they only check emails, and have teams meetings. They have to have the most cores and the most storage even though after checking reports there is no one in the organization using a managed Mac that is utilizing 4 TB of space.

I would be curious to know what proportion of PI time is spent preparing and getting approval for research grants for the various disciplines. Is it normal to have several different proposals submitted to the same or different agencies?

This system is only in play of course until universities realise they could not pay anything, and ask profs to live off tips from students after lectures.

The long game might be universities become the blockbuster videos of the future. Everything online. Private corporations provide lab space. Wework style. AI algorithm comes up with your ideal course, arranges local resources (including ex-universities providing white label ghost kitchen style resources)

Everyone is scrambling to learn AI using… free resources because they are:

Better than lectures

Faster learning rate

More current, learn last Wednesday’s state of the art

Fit into lifestyle

Ridiculous amount of choice

No BS you have to learn for the credits

And more!

All the universities have in their arsenal is the credential. It is a big gun but it will erode. Because you can test the knowledge at the interview. Or exams can be provided privately for a modest fee.

So much will become commoditised.

This article is...very misleading, implying that "overhead" is (in some dirty or despicable way) "taken" by the university. It's not. The indirect costs are added to the grant, so if you get a $500k grant, the university gets an extra percentage. Sample citation: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-reduce-over...

> The federal government has been adding indirect cost payments to research grants since 1947. Today, each university negotiates its own overhead rate—including one rate for facilities and one for administration—with the government every few years. Rates vary widely because of geography—costs are higher in urban areas—and because research expenses differ. Biomedical science, for example, often requires animal facilities, ethics review boards, and pricey equipment that aren't needed for social science. The base rate for NIH grants averages about 52%—meaning the agency pays a school $52,000 to cover overhead costs on a $100,000 research grant (making overhead costs about one-third of the grant total). Universities usually don't receive the entire 52%, however, in part because some awards for training and conferences carry a lower rate, and because certain expenses such as graduate student tuition don't qualify.

The author is also engaging in manipulative data presentation techniques (such as presenting the cost of a graduate student for five years, making it sound like an outrageously large $233,000, and not $46k/year, which when you factor in the number of hours a grad student typically works, is likely around federal minimum wage.)

If anyone would actually like to read up about the subject, here are some starting points:

https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/caar/indirect.jsp

https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps/html5/section_7/...

If the NIH gives you a "$5M" grant, you get the $5M plus the F&A costs. I don't know how NSF does it.

There are a lot of rules around what grant money can and cannot be spent on, and the rules are specifically set up to try and prevent administrators from taking more than what is reasonable for keeping the lights on, staff paid, etc.

To everyone getting outraged in the comments about evil universities and schools 'stealing' research dollars: you are being manipulated by a computational researcher who likely is not even remotely aware of the costs of the infrastructure to support them, such as computational/storage clusters they utilize. Those clusters, if supported from F&A/indirect costs, often cannot have usage charges, because that would be "double dipping."

F&A comes out of NSF grants. If I get a 500K grant, the first 150k or so would have gone to my university. Some universities this overhead number would be lower, some higher, but it is taken out first.

> The author is also engaging in manipulative data presentation techniques (such as presenting the cost of a graduate student for five years

I shared the yearly/monthly breakdown the sentence before that: "It includes their salary ($2200 a month), tuition ($15,000 a year), and benefits ($200 a month)."

I didn't post anything misleading or inaccurate. I included screenshots of my cumulative budget pages and included specific numbers to make examples more concrete. Not making any claim as to whether F&A is evil or not (it’s not).

You purposefully multiplied the grad student's compensation by five years to make it sound like a huge number.

You purposefully cited the NSF as an example, and left out mention that the NIH (five times the funding of NSF) and numerous other organizations, provide for F&A overhead.

You present the 30% "take" as being high, when it's actually very reasonable, and you clearly think it's all one giant waste of money. Heat, cooling, water, power, internet, computational clusters, internet connections? Those don't cost money! I don't have lab space! Why am I being charged overhead!?

Over and over you're clearly manipulating readers to generate outrage. The whole piece is one giant bitch-fest; woe be the poor AI researcher!

Do you not understand how you're fueling anti-science-research efforts? The level of threat scientific research funding is constantly under? And how one of the most frequent means of attack is the perceived wasteful overhead?

You seem to take this very personally.

The author is a computational researcher, and most of his funding likely comes from NSF not NIH. Why would you expect him to write about how NIH grants work? Why would you expect him to write how things work in life sciences? If you have an issue with it write your own blog post and share it.

As a non-academic I have to say I didn't read it like that. I saw no outrage, and I don't see 200k over 5 years as a big number. And I didn't get the sense that the support thought it was a big number.

I say this not to invalidate your reading of the article (I'm not down voting you), but merely to say that for one not invested in the area, I didn't see the emotions you see.

Which speaks to me about how it's easy, and dangerous, to ascribe motivations and emotions to a piece when they may not be there.

I found it interesting as a well detailed piece, I assumed most grants just went as salary to the researcher, and that cleared this up.

Also, perhaps I'm more aware of what things cost running a business, and so an "overheads" cost of 30% seems reasonable. Our cost-to-salary ratio is higher than that.

Yes, that's why it's "overhead" because it's just the cost to play the game.

But after overhead, even R01 grants which sound "massive" will just end up paying for a couple of PhDs and postdocs over four years at the end. But there's some "inflation" of overhead going on over the years, so the bang for your buck is dwindlding

This is something that varies widely by funding agency- you are correct that NIH grant budget limits are exclusive of indirects, but for the NSF the opposite is true. Different funders handle that differently, and additionally some funders have a cap on the indirect rate that they will allow. Many private foundations will only an indirect rate of 20%, for example. Some corporate grants that I've seen do not allow for any indirects at all.

Depending on your institution, and how they do their accounting, this can have serious negative effects for investigators. At an academic medical center, the majority of PIs are NIH funded, so all of the accounting and finance planning for research assumes a 54% indirect cost rate- so if, for whatever reason, your portfolio of grants doesn't fit that mold, you can have issues. I have known PIs who had multiple very large grants from private foundations, and so were not producing the expected amount of indirects and ended up being a net negative to their department's bottom line. This caused them (and their department chair) all kinds of problems.

Accounting and grant budgeting are two of the things that I wish I'd learned more about in grad school!

This is a good post, and I’m glad to see someone knowledgeable commenting. Other federal agencies do tend to award in fixed amounts, so the intricacies of indirect can get very complicated. Foundation indirects aren’t a debate worth having. They make the choice to pay indirects, the recipients will happily accept them.

My main response to the author, though, is what exactly does he expect the grant to cover? It’s paying for his time, infrastructure used, and the cost of supporting a grad student who’s likely generating the bulk of the data. These are the very real expenses of his research…

as a guy from Ukraine, and who familiar with group of people who receive paid "grants" i can say. This grants paid for political destructive groups. This is not about science, research, rights, whatever. I have war outside of my window. All "granted" organizations doing maximum efforts to lead much more deaths of ukranians as it possible. They doing maximum problems and political problems as they could. All sectors from IT, from lgbt, from different science grants and so on. All works in the same one road to weak Ukraine and kill as much people as possible. So yes, earlier i did not even imagine that grants it's some kind of salary. But now i have clear understanding for what and why the "free and easy" money paid for. These money paid not for purpose they initially paid. This is fund for political destructive organization covered by fake title.

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