> The process is completely broken. I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to industry to do research. > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutiona

> The process is completely broken. I agree. Personally, it's a big reason why I went to industry to do research. > Maybe I misunderstand you but institutional funding does almost never enable research. Mostly disagree. Two reasons: other institutional funding sources (e.g. teaching positions, personal or company grants, fundamental research grants, ...) and post-docs or profs hustling to shelter phd students from most of that overhead. Despite the incredible inefficiencies inherent in competitive research grants, research labs can scrap together funding with some form of continuity. What you do get often is an 'accordion effect', where a lab can swell in numbers on the coattails of few successful phd students and series of impactful papers, but at some point there's a crunch when it cannot lock in the same number of new research projects.