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I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the fixed overhead aspect of this. There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and li
by fooker 2y ago
I have a PhD from a reputed US university and I agree with the fixed overhead aspect of this.
There is no reason students get a third of the grant money and live in poverty (30k per year) while the university hires a football coach for ten million and builds a new building every year.
This is exactly the way this has to be handled, the universities are intentionally making this look worse than it is for public sympathy.
- colincooke 2y agoAgain please read my post carefully. There is a valid critique of overhead rates, but simply doing it suddenly in this manner has little added economic benefit in the long run, while ruining lives and creating waste/chaos in the short run. You can make a strong argument these institutions require reform, but such reform should be done not overnight, and not through such broad strokes.
- fooker 2y agoI disagree. The kind of reform you are talking about does not work against quasi-government organizations with the GDP of small countries. It'll be held up in courts for 50 years, and even then it'll be a game of whack a mole. There's a reason things got so bad.
- vkou 2y agoYes, the rule of law is incredibly inconvenient. Why be bound by it, when you can just do anything that you want?
- fooker 2y agoYes, that's why countries are not just run by courts and judges.
- vkou 2y agoIf you want to change the law, the legislature is right there. All it needs to do is pass a bill. If you can't be arsed to change the law, you have to follow it. This is generally how civilized people are expected to behave, and a 49.8% mandate does not give you license to do away with the rule of law.
- fooker 2y agoThere's no law to change here. Universities have freedom in how to use grant money. The government had so far not bothered with controlling what they do with the money coming from the government. The situation is a bit like you donating to a charity and they spending it on executive bonuses. Are you proposing that the government has to sign everything into law before taking any action? Can you think of why that might be a terrible idea?
- affinepplan 2y agothis isn't true. I don't think you understand how university funding works.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoThere isn't. Congress decided the budget. Your goal is to blame your reps and make sure they budget the way you want next time. That's the proper way.
- fooker 2y agoI think we are talking about different things here. I am not writing in support of funding cuts. I am strongly supportive of stopping universities from skimming most of the funding, and the research getting a tiny bit. Student researchers doing the actual work get less than minimum wage. If you are surprised by the 'less than minimum wage' part, it's a bit of creative accounting by universities counting a 'tuition waiver' as part of your wages.
- cudgy 2y ago
- rayiner 2y agoThere is a very basis here for invoking “rule of law” where: 1) we’re talking about discretionary grants being made out of taxpayer dollars; 2) congress has delegated authority to make the grants and to the executive, including determining indirects; and 3) the executive action is being used to save money. It’s also “the rule of law” in some sense when NIMBYs sue to keep a Ronald Mcdonald House from being built in their posh neighborhood, but that doesn’t mean we need to lionize it on that basis, or preemptively surrender to efforts to invoke the law to block reform. The universities can afford expensive lawyers with their 59% indirects, let those lawyers worry about it.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoTranslation: it's too slow and you don't care what breaks in the process. You already got yours. Anyone complaining about slow courts should probably focus on the courts themselves, or the money coming in. Not the act of laws.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- cudgy 2y agoAnd yet everyone was arguing recently about how amazing Deepseek was because they operated on such a smaller budget and how the restriction of chips into China forced them to find an efficient solution to training an LLM model. Sudden and drastic changes don’t always result in bad outcomes; in fact, they can many times produce outcomes that were never possible without the shock to the system. Most of the critics of the doge are arguing that the changes are too fast and that the system needs to gradually and systematically through a series of conferences and meetings come to a proposal that might be implemented sometime in the future.
- fnordpiglet 2y agoDoesn’t the football stuff fund itself through tickets, licensing, etc? It seems hard to believe research overhead grants are going to the football coach.
- fooker 2y agoMoney is fungible.
- bilbo0s 2y agoAnd? The one thing has nothing to do with the other. Football funds itself. That's why the coach makes so much money. If research funded itself, researchers would make a lot of money.
- costigan 2y agoOnly if the organization with the money wants to do that. Flip it around. Do you think the sports program at any major university pays for physics research facilities (or any topic outside of sports medicine)?
- fooker 2y ago>Only if the organization with the money wants to do that. Great, this should be a enough of an argument then for the federal government to decide how grant money is used.
- costigan 2y agoIt does. That's what the negotiation on overhead rates is for.
- ModernMech 2y agoA lot of this discussion is people who don’t understand the system reinventing it from first principles as they slowly come to terms with the nuance.
- robwwilliams 2y agoSpurious. Football coaches are not paid by overhead dollars. but mainly by alumni that like football wins. No, when a major for-profit company outsources research they pay way more than a 50% “markup”. Unless they go to a research university: then they pay much less, and just like the federal government they are getting a fine deal. Yes, some rich foundations (Gates, Ellison etc) exploit the situation and do not pay full overhead costs: They are essentially mooching on the research institutions and the federal government.
- cudgy 2y agoSo you don’t think that some of the money that gets sent to athletic directors to build fancy stadiums and pay for multimillion dollar coaches would’ve gone possibly to research facilities if those athletic departments didn’t exist?
- icameron 2y agoAthletic programs are a net profit center at many D1 football schools.
- cudgy 2y agoReally? Then why do they charge students athletic fees? Why do stadiums and athletic centers receive government grants and subsidies? Here is a huge list of donations from various groups to an athletic endowment at the University of Alabama. Much of this money could have and would have been donated to schools directly for research and academic purposes instead the athletic foundations. Alabama is one of the most successful Division 1 football programs in the nation. If these programs are so profitable, why do they need so much money for these endowments? And why all the money from governments and grants? Doesn’t add up. https://crimsontidefoundation.org/ways-to-support/Endowments.aspx https://crimsontidefoundation.org/ways-to-support/Endowments...
- wredcoll 2y ago> Here is a huge list of donations from various groups to an athletic endowment at the University of Alabama. Much of this money could have and would have been donated to schools directly for research and academic purposes instead the athletic foundations. Uh, what? Why would that happen, exactly?
- HDThoreaun 2y agoFootball program spends big because it rakes in huge amounts. In order to keep making all that money though they need a good team which costs money.