5 ms·

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money. First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead. Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000. Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead): * the building * the real estate the building sits on * the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods) * security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people) * the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc. * construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies * grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal * technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff * business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this. * all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.

PheonixPharts 3y ago
Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue: > (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money." Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.
- bachmeier 3y ago
  I think they were probably replying to exmadscientist, not thelittlenag.
glitchc 3y ago
Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet. The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  There are countries where students are not charged tuition (or, if tuition is charged, it is meagre) and there overhead from grants is most definitely seen as important revenue.
cycomanic 3y ago
It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting. Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff). Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly comparable). Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load). Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university. In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university. Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich. For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students. Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind. I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.

PheonixPharts 3y ago

Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue: > (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money." Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.

bachmeier 3y ago
I think they were probably replying to exmadscientist, not thelittlenag.

glitchc 3y ago

Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet. The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
There are countries where students are not charged tuition (or, if tuition is charged, it is meagre) and there overhead from grants is most definitely seen as important revenue.

cycomanic 3y ago

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting. Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff). Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly comparable). Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load). Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university. In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university. Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich. For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students. Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind. I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.