You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable teac

You can find a number of university budgets online. Grants will generally be counted as income. Research universities are still universities with a sizable teaching requirement. If you go off of the paper I cited above, at least half of the per student cost can be attributed to this (lecturer salaries, overhead, and administration). Once you get to the research part, you have to keep in mind that tenured salaries and related overhead are generally covered by the university, along with one to two researchers (normally a PhD and a Post Doc).There are also a bunch of items that simply can't be funded through research grants, such as social security contributions and general equipment (e.g., work stations). The 20K number is also extremely conservative. Like I mentioned, Karlsruhe, which is a reasonably good (excellent) technical university, has an average student cost of ~35K EUR. I can't speak for them personally, but I doubt that KIT is dropping a lot of money on subsidized student housing and gourmet meal halls.