4 ms·

I don't think federal grants cover the research costs completely. For example, if my professor wins one grant, part of the money will be put aside for to cover

by atg2taa 13y ago

I don't think federal grants cover the research costs completely. For example, if my professor wins one grant, part of the money will be put aside for to cover 10% of his salary. He certainly doesn't have 10 big grants in play at any given time, so the remainder has to be offset by the University. Add to that, you need a lot of overhead like administrative assistants, grant managers, technology transfer officers.

jurassic 13y ago
I would be surprised if your professor's research tab is partly covered by the university unless they are using startup funds as a new faculty hire. The universities I've been at all (Caltech, MIT) have a significant "overhead" charge against all incoming grants to cover the cost of university infrastructure, keeping the lights on, etc. So it is research that is subsidizing the university, not the other way around.
- mjn 13y ago
  The last sentence is somewhat questionable, except at the top universities. Only at the most grant-successful universities does the overhead actually break even in recouping the extra outlays universities put into research. Examples: construction of research-specific laboratory facilities, co-financing of expenditures they wouldn't have otherwise undertaken (many grants require co-funding), increased salaries and hiring packages caused by bidding wars for faculty who have successful grant-getting records, department backstopping of PhD stipends when a large group has a dry year grant-wise, salaries for grant-writing assistance and research-support staff, etc., etc. The former Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing reached a similar conclusion: http://innovate-edu.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/ http://innovate-edu.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...
dnautics 13y ago
NIH keeps its overhead negotiations secret, but I know that The Scripps Research Institute, is currently at about 85%, schools like Harvard, MIT, and Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, are hovering around that value right now, although IIRC in the past TSRI got 100% and there are rumors that some places got >100% overhead; the government in its budgetary crunch has begun reducing these figures. DOE is slightly more parsimonious with its overhead, NSF is the most conservative. DARPA gives overhead in all sorts of ranges. Or so I hear. And TSRI doesn't give most of its professors salary, unless they are doing "administrative duties" (Pres, VP, dept chair, etc) If you run out of grants, you basically don't get paid anymore. At one point ~90% of TSRI operating costs were run off of NIH overhead, all coming in from a very dynamic patchwork of grants from all of their PIs. I think then the pressure to keep getting grants made the place a bit of a boiler room, there was an uptick in shady science (Peter Schultz's retractions, Geoffrey Chang's retractions, and others I'm not ready to talk about yet)... Eventually professors started leaving because they didn't want to take it anymore.
- secabeen 13y ago
  Overhead is normally calculated as % of grant that goes to overhead. UC is around 50%, some of the Ivys are in the 60% range.
  - dnautics 13y ago
    that may be true for nonprofits, but that is not correct for federal science grants. Overhead is calculated as what % of the nominal amount you ask for is added on top for facilities. So a 100,000 grant plus 20% overhead costs 120,000. A 1M grant plus 60% overhead costs 1.6M. That's because an agency like the NIH, will have a program project and decide, "ok. We want project X to be done and we think it will take ~150,000 in JUST science costs" - in theory, that should be more or less invariant across the institutions that get funded. THEN an added cost is what it takes for it to get done in X institution. If overhead were calculated as % of the full grant, then the math gets trickier to isolate the "invariant science part". The reason why separating the "invariant science part" is important, is because when the agencies send out an program call, they say, "you get $2M to do the science", and each institute that is bidding to get the grant is not supposed to know how much of that gets taken up by overhead by other institutes. The net result is each institute is competing for the same pool of "we can do science with this" money without the PIs having to worry about how much of the cookie gets eaten up by their own institute. In general, I don't really like much of anything to do with the federal government's involvement with science, but: The way this is structured is probably a good thing, since scientists are really bad at thinking about much besides their own science, and if you make them do this mental gymnastic, something's going to come short, and there will probably be more failure all around from lack of funds. The responsibility to figure out how to get that administrative cost then falls on the program manager - and the grant reviewers are instructed to take overhead into account.

by atg2taa 13y ago

jurassic 13y ago

I would be surprised if your professor's research tab is partly covered by the university unless they are using startup funds as a new faculty hire. The universities I've been at all (Caltech, MIT) have a significant "overhead" charge against all incoming grants to cover the cost of university infrastructure, keeping the lights on, etc. So it is research that is subsidizing the university, not the other way around.

mjn 13y ago
The last sentence is somewhat questionable, except at the top universities. Only at the most grant-successful universities does the overhead actually break even in recouping the extra outlays universities put into research. Examples: construction of research-specific laboratory facilities, co-financing of expenditures they wouldn't have otherwise undertaken (many grants require co-funding), increased salaries and hiring packages caused by bidding wars for faculty who have successful grant-getting records, department backstopping of PhD stipends when a large group has a dry year grant-wise, salaries for grant-writing assistance and research-support staff, etc., etc. The former Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing reached a similar conclusion: http://innovate-edu.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-sure-fire-ways-to-lose-money-on-research/ http://innovate-edu.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...

dnautics 13y ago

NIH keeps its overhead negotiations secret, but I know that The Scripps Research Institute, is currently at about 85%, schools like Harvard, MIT, and Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford, are hovering around that value right now, although IIRC in the past TSRI got 100% and there are rumors that some places got >100% overhead; the government in its budgetary crunch has begun reducing these figures. DOE is slightly more parsimonious with its overhead, NSF is the most conservative. DARPA gives overhead in all sorts of ranges. Or so I hear. And TSRI doesn't give most of its professors salary, unless they are doing "administrative duties" (Pres, VP, dept chair, etc) If you run out of grants, you basically don't get paid anymore. At one point ~90% of TSRI operating costs were run off of NIH overhead, all coming in from a very dynamic patchwork of grants from all of their PIs. I think then the pressure to keep getting grants made the place a bit of a boiler room, there was an uptick in shady science (Peter Schultz's retractions, Geoffrey Chang's retractions, and others I'm not ready to talk about yet)... Eventually professors started leaving because they didn't want to take it anymore.

secabeen 13y ago
Overhead is normally calculated as % of grant that goes to overhead. UC is around 50%, some of the Ivys are in the 60% range.
- dnautics 13y ago
  that may be true for nonprofits, but that is not correct for federal science grants. Overhead is calculated as what % of the nominal amount you ask for is added on top for facilities. So a 100,000 grant plus 20% overhead costs 120,000. A 1M grant plus 60% overhead costs 1.6M. That's because an agency like the NIH, will have a program project and decide, "ok. We want project X to be done and we think it will take ~150,000 in JUST science costs" - in theory, that should be more or less invariant across the institutions that get funded. THEN an added cost is what it takes for it to get done in X institution. If overhead were calculated as % of the full grant, then the math gets trickier to isolate the "invariant science part". The reason why separating the "invariant science part" is important, is because when the agencies send out an program call, they say, "you get $2M to do the science", and each institute that is bidding to get the grant is not supposed to know how much of that gets taken up by overhead by other institutes. The net result is each institute is competing for the same pool of "we can do science with this" money without the PIs having to worry about how much of the cookie gets eaten up by their own institute. In general, I don't really like much of anything to do with the federal government's involvement with science, but: The way this is structured is probably a good thing, since scientists are really bad at thinking about much besides their own science, and if you make them do this mental gymnastic, something's going to come short, and there will probably be more failure all around from lack of funds. The responsibility to figure out how to get that administrative cost then falls on the program manager - and the grant reviewers are instructed to take overhead into account.