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