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I'd be curious what the impact of fewer but more voluminous grants would be on academia. As other commenters have noted this grant turns into roughly 1 student
by lumost 5y ago
I'd be curious what the impact of fewer but more voluminous grants would be on academia. As other commenters have noted this grant turns into roughly 1 student for 5 years working on the project for a professor. Even for this grant, you would expect that a professor would need 3-5 such ongoing grants to really keep the lab functional.
It took 2 weeks to craft this grant proposal. Assuming the average academic has a 30% hit rate and the average grant provides funding for ~1 year... then this translates to roughly 30 weeks per year. A somewhat extreme example, but I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers get worse as you move to lower tier universities - and better for higher tier universities.
Would it be better to simply grant lab's to researchers with a general research plan on a 3-5 year cadence?
- zozbot234 5y agoMore voluminous grants would be riskier and harder to evaluate, AIUI. As of today, the idea is that a grant functions both as a prize for having a competitive proposal in the first place, and as a wager on behalf of broader society on the actual research impact. So yes, grant proposals take time to craft but that's just part of the game, and arguably of the actual research that you'll be doing.
- lumost 5y agopossible, and an employee who doesn't know if they'll have a job next week might also work harder - at least for a time. We are already taking the societal risk of employing a professor and giving them grant money - at least we can get the productive side of the money we spend.
- the_snooze 5y agoThere are indeed larger grant programs. Those tend to be collaborative affairs. You have multiple PIs across different institutes going in on the same submission. Each person contributes a piece of a larger (hopefully cohesive) whole. It's generally less work per person compared to a solo submission for a smaller pot, but it's one of those cases where it's crucial to have established working relationships in your research community.
- thrownawayalre 5y agoIn many fields, students do not need extra grants for funding. Startup funds, teaching assistantship (TA) and other sources fund PhD students. You can advise 3-5 students who TA at the same time, without writing grants. Some fields on the other hand need more external grants to fund students. It really is field-dependent.
- Fomite 5y agoThis. A mentor of mine is able to fund most of her students, save for maybe their final year, on TA-shps. I'm in a purely research department - if I don't have funding for the full time, I don't have students.
- dsqrt 5y agoMost of the federal grants I am aware of have duration of 3+ year (the typical duration of a PhD after having completed the course work).