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> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets) Don't fo

• mjburgess 3y ago
  What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive. Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible). Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.
  • quacked 3y ago
    I don't know if I'd agree that Reason and Merit are always applied by the market, unless the market is referring to "whatever VCs can be convinced to give money to". However, the crux of what you're saying, which is that in academia Reason and Merit are thrown directly out of the window is completely true. My favorite discrepancy is in hiring. In startups, you can win a $150k/year job in a ten minute conversation with the right person and be at work the following Monday, even that afternoon in some cases. This is especially true if your previous work is already known to the person doing the hiring. In academia (and to a lesser extent government work) they're conducting 6-month searches and stringing along candidates for months at a time for $65k jobs with a fraction of the responsibility of the equivalent in the private industry.
    • mjburgess 3y ago
      In the medium term, on average, the market tends to kill-off sheer stupidity. It is kinda traumatic in the short-term to see how much stupidity is rewarded, of course. (And here, are VCs anything more than serial idiots?) But if you really want to persue a basically competent merit-based path, there's usually one available. You can make 2x in a crypto conjob, or 1x on a gamble that someone needs a plausible value-adding service. I just don't see this logic at work in academia. The only reason I care here is how often academics have a kind of superstition of 'business' which is nothing other than a description of their own situation. When, in reality, freedoom from these chronic stupidities lies in everything they claim to hate.
      • StressedDev 3y ago
        A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money. One thing to remember is that not all VCs are the same and there probably are some which are very good at what they do. Another way of saying this is just because some VCs are not good at their job does not mean all VCs are not good at their job.
        • tobyjsullivan 3y ago
          > A VC which is a serial idiot will eventually run out of money. This is not really true as VCs are not the sources of the money they invest. VCs raise money from their backers and there really is a (virtually) infinite amount of money available to raise, even for a repeatedly unsuccessful VC firm. As with the startups themselves, the key skill is raising, not earning the actual ROI.
    • jltsiren 3y ago
      Academic hiring processes are ridiculous. Not because anyone wants it that way but because citizens like to complain. They complain when they think tax/tuition money is being used for inapproriate or frivolous purposes. They complain when they see nepotism and corruption. They complain about perceived political biases and discrimination. And so on. Every time something goes wrong badly enough to cause a scandal, new processes are put in place to prevent that specific harm in the future. On the other hand, nobody really cares about effective and efficient use of tax money. People surely complain about waste, but the complaints are rarely specific enough to have consequences. Given a choice between preventing a specific harm and using tax money better, people almost always choose preventing the specific harm. The salaries are what they are, because universities can't afford to pay more. There is only so much tax/tuition money available to them. People like to complain about administrative bloat, but it's their fault really. Every time people complain about something specific in the academia, they are advocating for giving more money to the administration to fix that, and for giving less money to the people who teach and do research. That's just the way public management works. Additionally, academic hiring processes are more involved than in the industry, because there is less responsibility. Not despite it. People are effectively given money to do things they would do anyway, and the employer often can't tell the difference between a good hire and a bad hire, except maybe much later. If you can't fix you mistakes in a timely manner, you'll probably want to think things through before making the decision.
  • Fomite 3y ago
    What amuses, and irritates, me is that industry frequently projects their own system onto academia. They get incensed at the idea of overhead - but don't recognize that we're not legally allowed to have a profit margin.
• KennyBlanken 3y ago
  So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.
  • lostlogin 3y ago
    You don’t think so? It sounds like something that would happen. Where I was there were complex arrangements to avoid breaking grant rules while also spending every last cent.
  • exmadscientist 3y ago
    This behavior is known to all parties. It's openly advertised and discussed by the admin office people.
  • justin66 3y ago
    > Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend. cue the audience laughter
• stavros 3y ago
  I don't understand this comment. So basically, I have a bunch of dirty money, I give it to a university, who then use all of it to buy a bunch of stuff that my own company sells, thus cleaning the money? So basically what I've done is I've given away $X million of stuff, and my company gets its 5% margin out of it? This makes zero sense to me.
  • exmadscientist 3y ago
    They are removing conditions ("strings") from federal grant money and simultaneously taking a large cut to fund the university's general operations. They are not laundering general money, they are doing a very specific thing here.
    • stavros 3y ago
      Hm, I guess I just don't know enough about how grants work to understand what's going on.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      • HansHamster 3y ago
        The grant has restrictions on how the money can be used and the university takes a sizeable chunk of this (because they can). Then out of generosity and the pure kindness of their heart they might give you back a small chunk of that sum without the same restrictions.
        • johnvaluk 3y ago
          This isn't fair. Researchers put an extraordinary burden on administration in an academic institution. Research by its very nature is cutting edge and is always testing limits. "I want it now!" ignores existing streamlined processes and administration often provides value by enforcing compliance. This kind of oversight also minimizes a lot of abuse.
• CamperBob2 3y ago
  Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants) Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calculator" out of petty cash.
  • robwwilliams 3y ago
    That statement is flat out false. You can buy as many computers as you can justify on an NIH research project. I have bought several dozens over 35 years without a peep.
  • mattkrause 3y ago
    It's also not actually true. The NIH themselves is fine with you buying computers that directly support the "aims" of the grant (e.g., data analysis). They don't want you buying "general" office equipment off a grant. However, most universities are touchy about this and default-deny all computer purchases unless you yell the chapter and verse of the regs at them (which I have now done several times).
    • CamperBob2 3y ago
      Yep, I'm referring to a historical anecdote, not current practice. It'll be tough to dig up a solid citation for the HP "calculator" story but I've heard it from more than one reasonably-credible source, e.g.: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9499/when-did-computers-stop-needing-to-be-marketed-as-calculators https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/9499/when... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A#cite_note-hpmuseum-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett-Packard_9100A#cite_not... .
      • kps 3y ago
        I've heard the same about the DEC PDP branding — a “Programmable Data Processor” could slip through where a “computer” couldn't.
• godelski 3y ago
  > Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. For anyone questioning this line, let's remember a few things - Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment. - Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding. - A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student. - Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change) - A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen) - When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award). - Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues - Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time) - Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall - Universities pay for access to venues where their researchers published in and where their researchers performed volunteer service for. - Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work. Think about it this way, what if we framed this as a job? Your job considers you a junior part time employee for the first 5 years and if you don't complete all 5 years every other job will treat you as a junior part timer. Your first two years 50% of your time is spent doing training, 50% of your time is spent teaching the interns (who pay, but who spend 100% of their day training), and whatever time you have left is spent performing research. You're told you're a part time employee because 51% of your time is training. After two years you finish training but get no change in pay (maybe +$100/mo), nor graduate to a full time employee. By year 4 your manager never shows up except few months your manager comes around telling you that you need to make sure to make a deadline and they need to read your report first. They demand it is in their hands a week early so they can review it. 3am the night before the deadline they ask for major rewrites, this is the first you've heard of any problems. 10 minutes past the deadline you're still getting requests to "modify the graphic" with instructions like "a little to the left" or "I don't like the colors" and the iterative process can only be performed by back and forth submissions with random delays as your manager won't touch the source code. Every few months your manager stops by to check on progress and ask you to write a report that needs to be written by tomorrow. They'll slap their name at the top and if successful they advance their career. Your reward is via proxy. After 5 years, you write a large report about what you did the last 5 years filled with stuff you've mostly done over the last 18 months and pretend that you had a plan all along. If they approve, they usually do (but will ask for changes), you can go be a manager if you're lucky or get a full time position. Or if you go the post-doc route, 75% employee. Idk, this sum it up pretty well? Anyone want to add anything?
• tnecniv 3y ago
  Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that. I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.
  • pfannkuchen 3y ago
    How does treating the tuition as a charge and payment (instead of the tuition being zero) benefit the university?
    • moregrist 3y ago
      It transfers money from grant funds into the University general fund, where it can be used for other purposes, like paying for less lucrative departments and administrative salaries. More or less, this plus the ph.d. student’s stipend is the cost of the student, and both can be charged to a grant that the student is working on. This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it). Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.
      • ftyers 3y ago
        NSF definitely does, and it's often (at least at R1) of >50%
      • kelipso 3y ago
        Overhead for government contractors are typically 100% or their salary or more for research work, so percentages like that (whether fair or not) are pretty standard.
    • j7ake 3y ago
      It’s more expensive for the prof to hire the student. At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.
• robwwilliams 3y ago
  Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.
  • queuebert 3y ago
    Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.
    • robwwilliams 3y ago
      Not true at all in USA. Check out overheads at Salk Institute or other high profile non-profits.
    • Fomite 3y ago
      This is not universally true. The last grant I had with a pure research non-profit, my state university had a markedly lower overhead rate, as well as far more flexibility in lowering it (if a sponsor pre-specifies a lower rate, we almost always accept that).
    • kelipso 3y ago
      No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.
      • queuebert 3y ago
        Five researchers and one admin is cheaper than two researchers, two postdocs, a grad student, two admins, a compliance officer, an HR office, a grants office, a budget office, a legal office, some Deans, Vice Deans, Vice Chairs, Vice Chancellors, etc. You get my point. I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.
• analog31 3y ago
  In a lot of departments, employees are unofficially expected to buy computers out of their own pockets. Workers are often quite incensed about this. In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.
• zhdc1 3y ago
  > Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited. This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.
• Fomite 3y ago
  "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants. Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.
• pxmpxm 3y ago
  Is this a recent thing? Many many years ago I did work for a NIH funded study and we had no issues buying machines, with the stipulation that the servers have to be Sun Ultras for some reason.