1. I don't know where you are getting this but this is wrong. First of all tuition doesn't pay anywhere close to even breaking even at this point much less inve

1. I don't know where you are getting this but this is wrong. First of all tuition doesn't pay anywhere close to even breaking even at this point much less investment. Second MIT is a private university so I don't know where you are getting tax thing. Where do you get more than half of funding doesn't go directly to my research? I think you are misunderstanding overhead rates. For example, a 50% overhead rate means to spend a million dollars for my lab, I need to raise 1.5M. 2. Most universities that do that don't require you to pay for space, but will base the amount of space you have on grant dollars you bring in. None that I know of make you pay for electricity, gas, cleaning, grant admin, compliance, bookkeeping, etc. 3. How does overhead make it difficult to do convincing and novel research? In fact overhead helps it in my opinion. This idea that getting rid of overhead will somehow make anything better or have better value for the money is seriously misguided.