3 ms·

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.

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.