5 ms·

I get the sense from colleagues and visiting different universities that this varies across the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU, but grants are now the bread and

I get the sense from colleagues and visiting different universities that this varies across the US, Canada, the UK, and the EU, but grants are now the bread and butter at most US universities. It's not really enough to publish 100s of articles, or have a high h index, it's to bring in money even if it's not strictly necessary for your research. Part of the reason we have the problem you're mentioning is not that there isn't enough money to go around, it's that universities (at least in the US) now depend on inflated costs to function. The costs of research are kicked down the road to the federal government, and the research itself is seen in terms of profits rather than discovery. So if you have all these universities essentially telling researchers their jobs are on the line if they don't bring in profits, you're going to have everyone scrambling to bring in as much money as they can. It's not just postdocs or untenured research professor lines, it's tenured professors as well, whose income can be brought down below some necessary standard of living, or who can have salaries frozen or resources cut. I was thinking about this the other morning. I had a grant proposal that the program officer was really excited about. This program of research could probably be conducted for almost nothing because it involved archival data analysis. However if you put a dollar amount on the time, it might realistically actually cost around 250k USD, maybe 500k max, pretty generously in terms of staff effort. However, the university managed to inflate the budget ask to around 2 million for the sole purpose of indirect funds. When you have that kind of monetary incentive (carrot or stick), of course you're going to have thousands of persons applying for each opportunity. It's what led to the graduate student ponzi scheme, inflated numbers of surplus graduates, etc and so forth. It all trickles down too, in terms of research claims, p-hacking, etc and so forth. There's a place for profit, but there's also some realms where it does nothing but corrupt.

native_samples 5y ago
The problem here is not profit but the reverse, the corruption comes from the absence of profit. Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. The government effectively "loses" all of it in accounting terms, but because it's tax it doesn't matter. The buyer is blind and doesn't even bother looking at the papers they've paid for, let alone caring about the quality. Now go look at the results coming out of corporate labs when the corporates actually want to use the tech. You get amazing labs that are consistently re-defining the state of the art: Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research, FAIR, Intel, ARM, TSMC etc. The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages - partly because being non-profit driven entities they have no way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  > Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. Do research projects sometimes fail to deliver? Yeah. But that's just the reality of doing research. The problem I see is people expect research to be closer to development, with specific ROIs and known deliverables years ahead of time. Sometimes in the course of research you realize what you said you were going to do is impossible, and that's a good result we need to embrace, instead of attaching an expected profit to everything. > Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research I don't know so much about all the labs you listed, but just taking these three, they certainly don't have a good feeling for what their research is worth either. Do you think Bell Labs fully comprehended the worth of the transistor? For all the research Google does, ad money still accounts for 80% of their revenue. DeepMind is a pretty ironic choice because Google has dropped billions into them and it's still not clear where the profit is going to come from. So it's not clear anyone, even those with a profit motive, have any way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth. But that's not to say there's anything wrong with that... that's just how research works. You don't know how things are going to turn out, and sometimes it takes a very long time to figure that out, and it. This is why massive corporations like AT&T, Intel, Google, Xerox, MS etc. are able to run such labs. > The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages I've seen this happen first hand. In my experience these researchers usually go on to spend their time figuring our how to get us to click on more ads or to engage with a platform more. In one instance, I remember one of my lab mates being hired out of his PhD to use his research to figure out which relative ordering and styling of ads on a front page optimized ad revenue for Google. They paid him quite a lot of money to do that, and I guess it made Google some profit. But is the world better off?
  - bluGill 5y ago
    > This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. That is pure corruption: the grant is funneling money from you to a domestic ariline. If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, and then that you found the best price. (though the grant should allow you to ignore the "skip maintenance and pilot training to give you a lower price" airline, but if that best happens to be foreign it shouldn't matter to the grant unless there is corruption involved)
ta988 5y ago
It is pretty common for universities to impose a 50-59.9% indirect cost (that they take in addition to the requested funding by the researchers). I've had grants where the university refused to offer a few thousands dollars of free equipment use as support in the grant (which is something required for funding) on a multi million grant. That's because universities are badly managed, they bleed money with tuition to compete with other universities, pay indecent salaries to administratives (and sometimes researchers) many universities pay millions to their basketball coach. And then you have to pay for all those renovations that are requires to get a good ranking in the annual US news or whatever other performance metric. And you are right for grad students ponzi scheme saw that firsthand.

native_samples 5y ago

The problem here is not profit but the reverse, the corruption comes from the absence of profit. Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. The government effectively "loses" all of it in accounting terms, but because it's tax it doesn't matter. The buyer is blind and doesn't even bother looking at the papers they've paid for, let alone caring about the quality. Now go look at the results coming out of corporate labs when the corporates actually want to use the tech. You get amazing labs that are consistently re-defining the state of the art: Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research, FAIR, Intel, ARM, TSMC etc. The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages - partly because being non-profit driven entities they have no way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth.

ModernMech 5y ago
> Universities and grants are this firehose of tax money being sprayed everywhere without even the slightest bit of accountability in how it's used. This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. Do research projects sometimes fail to deliver? Yeah. But that's just the reality of doing research. The problem I see is people expect research to be closer to development, with specific ROIs and known deliverables years ahead of time. Sometimes in the course of research you realize what you said you were going to do is impossible, and that's a good result we need to embrace, instead of attaching an expected profit to everything. > Bell Labs, DeepMind, Google Research I don't know so much about all the labs you listed, but just taking these three, they certainly don't have a good feeling for what their research is worth either. Do you think Bell Labs fully comprehended the worth of the transistor? For all the research Google does, ad money still accounts for 80% of their revenue. DeepMind is a pretty ironic choice because Google has dropped billions into them and it's still not clear where the profit is going to come from. So it's not clear anyone, even those with a profit motive, have any way to judge what any piece of research is actually worth. But that's not to say there's anything wrong with that... that's just how research works. You don't know how things are going to turn out, and sometimes it takes a very long time to figure that out, and it. This is why massive corporations like AT&T, Intel, Google, Xerox, MS etc. are able to run such labs. > The first thing that happens when the corporate labs get interested in an area is that universities are immediately emptied out because they refuse to pay competitive wages I've seen this happen first hand. In my experience these researchers usually go on to spend their time figuring our how to get us to click on more ads or to engage with a platform more. In one instance, I remember one of my lab mates being hired out of his PhD to use his research to figure out which relative ordering and styling of ads on a front page optimized ad revenue for Google. They paid him quite a lot of money to do that, and I guess it made Google some profit. But is the world better off?
- bluGill 5y ago
  > This is definitely not true, recipients of grants are heavily restricted on what kind of things they can spend that money on. I can't even fly a non-domestic carrier using grant money without proving no other alternatives exist. That is pure corruption: the grant is funneling money from you to a domestic ariline. If it was about accountability you would have to prove the flight was really needed in the first place, and then that you found the best price. (though the grant should allow you to ignore the "skip maintenance and pilot training to give you a lower price" airline, but if that best happens to be foreign it shouldn't matter to the grant unless there is corruption involved)

ta988 5y ago

It is pretty common for universities to impose a 50-59.9% indirect cost (that they take in addition to the requested funding by the researchers). I've had grants where the university refused to offer a few thousands dollars of free equipment use as support in the grant (which is something required for funding) on a multi million grant. That's because universities are badly managed, they bleed money with tuition to compete with other universities, pay indecent salaries to administratives (and sometimes researchers) many universities pay millions to their basketball coach. And then you have to pay for all those renovations that are requires to get a good ranking in the annual US news or whatever other performance metric. And you are right for grad students ponzi scheme saw that firsthand.