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It's pretty typical, actually. 50% is about the minimum that major universities take out of a grant you get as a researcher at the university. It's nominally
by jofer 2y ago
It's pretty typical, actually. 50% is about the minimum that major universities take out of a grant you get as a researcher at the university.
It's nominally to fund general facilities, etc. At least at public universities, it does wind up indirectly supporting departments that get less grant money or (more commonly) just general overhead/funds. However, it's not explicitly for that. It's just that universities take at least half of any grant you get. There's a reason large research programs are pushed for at both private and public universities. They do bring in a lot of cash that can go to a lot of things.
This also factors a lot into postdocs vs grad students. In addition to the ~50% that the university takes, you then need to pay your grad student's tuition out of the grant. At some universities, that will be the full, out-of-state/unsupported rate. At others, it will be the minimum in-state rate. Then you also pay a grad student's (meager) salary out of the grant. However, for a post-doc, you only pay their (less meager, but still not great) salary. So you get a lot more bang for your buck out of post-docs than grad students, for better or worse. This has led to ~10 years of post-doc positions being pretty typical post PhD in a lot of fields.
With all that said, I know it sounds "greedy", but universities really do provide a lot that it's reasonable to take large portions of grants for. ~50% has always seemed high to me, but I do feel that the institution and facilities really provide value. E.g. things like "oh, hey, my fancy instrument needs a chilled water supply and the university has that in-place", as well as less tangible things like "large concentration of unique skillsets". I'm not sure it justifies 50% grant overhead, but before folks get out their pitchforks, universities really do provide a lot of value for that percentage of grant money they're taking.
- rayiner 2y agoWell that makes it sound worse than I thought. Why should it be any higher than the pro rata allocation of the project’s actual use of university facilities (lab space, equipment, etc)? Even in the defense industry, a cost-plus contract with a 10% margin is a lot. And it’s a federal crime to include costs in the overhead amount that aren’t traceable to the actual project.
- SJC_Hacker 2y agoIts essentially a subsidy, and been abused for years. One clarifying point. Indirect is normally charged on top whatever the PI gets. So they don't "take out" 50% the total. They add 50% to the original grant. So if a researcher gets a $500k grant, 50% indirect would be $250k, and the total allocation is $750k.
- rayiner 2y agoThat sounds similar to cost plus in the defense sector.
- fraggleysun 2y agoIt is different. Cost plus allows the contractors to charge for development and add a profit margin. The corporate equivalent would be a fixed price contract, which has overhead built in and far exceeds university rates.
- insane_dreamer 2y agoIn the defense/other industries, everything is put under the "cost" part. There's just a lot more line items that cover all that stuff. The overhead simplifies this to a large extent in that the PI only needs to account, as a "direct" expense the cost of his team (salaries, and things not covered by the university such as compensation to human subject volunteers, etc.)
- garden_hermit 2y agoThe indirect is a negotiated flat rate that covers costs that would be too numerous or difficult to account for in the direct costs. Like how would you as a researcher budget a fractionalized portion of access to a supercomputer cluster in each and every grant you need? You would need to hire new accountants just to handle this! The indirect rate is basically covering the whole infrastructure of research at a university. In theory all could be put into direct costs but…again…we get to tremendously difficult accounting