https://austinhenley.com/blog/grantbudget.html
Austin Z. Henley
I work on AI + dev tools.
austinhenley@microsoft.com
@austinzhenley
@azhenley@hci.social
github/AZHenley
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Home | Publications | Blog
---------------------------------------------------------------------
What does a research grant pay for?
4/9/2023
A painting of hands reaching over a pile of books trying to get a big
bag of money.
Until I wrote my first grant proposal, I knew very little about what
a federal research grant pays for.
I'll share what my grants covered and the reasoning behind it. Note:
I was a computer science professor researching software engineering
at a large state university in the US, primarily funded by the
National Science Foundation (NSF).
TLDR: Each of my grant budgets included the university's cut, a
fraction of a month of salary for me per year, a graduate student,
conference travel for both of us, and a very small amount to conduct
user studies. This amounts to a little under $100,000 per year per
grant.
A summary budget page from each of my three NSF grants. The
cumulative budget pages from my three NSF grants. Two-year CRII on
the left, three-year Core Small in the center, and five-year CAREER
on the right.
I'll go into detail of each of the following:
* The university's cut
* My summer salary
* Graduate students
* Travel
* Other: equipment, undergrads, user studies
The university's cut
People seem shocked to find out that the university takes a portion
of every grant, and even more so when they hear the percentage that
they take.
For every $1 I budgeted for my research, I had to account for an
additional $0.53 that would go to the university. Universities have a
pre-specified percentage for overhead (also called facilities and
administrative (F&A) costs or indirect costs). Equipment and tuition
are excluded from the overhead calculation. It supposedly covers
things like having a building to work in, electricity, basic computer
equipment, and support staff. It is split amongst the university,
college, and department. These F&A rates seem to only ever go up...
A very small amount of this money will sometimes trickle back down to
the researcher.
To put it in perspective, my last grant was $481,112 of which
$139,022 was budgeted to go to the university for overhead.
My summer salary
Yes, professors get to pocket some of their grants! Though that is
because they are often only guaranteed 9 months of salary despite
working the entire year.
It is typical to pay yourself 0.5 to 1 month of salary per grant.
Specifically, my three NSF grants covered 0.55, 0.75, and 1.0 months
of my salary for each year. I found it funny that my college factored
in annual raises into the budget that were always far higher than I
actually received.
A very stressful part of faculty life was knowing that my annual
compensation was about to take a nose dive if I don't get another
grant.
More grants is generally better, though there are restrictions on
your salary. Most notably, the NSF restricts you to 2 months of
salary from all of your active NSF grants at any given time. Even if
you have other funding sources, you can't have more than 12 months of
salary.
What do you do if you're swimming in funding then? You can buy out of
teaching. You effectively pay for the cost of an adjunct to take your
teaching load.
Graduate students
The largest component of my grants was supporting a graduate student.
They're the ones doing the bulk of the daily work. It includes their
salary ($2200 a month), tuition ($15,000 a year), and benefits ($200
a month). Approximately $233,000 of $481,112 from my last grant was
for a graduate student for 5 years.
There are ways to stretch this further. For example, many of my
graduate students also worked as teaching assistants during the
school year which covered their tuition, benefits, and a portion of
their salary, so I just had to pay the difference in salary. Though
it did eat a nontrivial amount of their time and attention. Moreover,
my graduate students often won fellowships/scholarships that boosted
their salary to a more sustainable wage.
Travel
In computer science, conferences are a vital way to network and share
research. It is also often required once a paper has been accepted
for publication, so I budget for one trip per year for both myself
and a graduate student. I budgeted for alternating between domestic
and international travel every other year. Something like $2300 for
domestic per person and $3300 for international per person. It covers
airfare, food, conference registration (silly expensive!), and hotel.
Other
The only other cost I included were incentive payments to
participants in our user studies, which were quite small: $600ish per
year to pay 15 participants.
It is also common to budget for undergraduate researchers as hourly
employees. The NSF makes it easy to add-on to grants for this later
through "NSF REU Supplements". I hired many undergrads, though I
always used my startup fund.
What about equipment? Considering I work in software, all I or my
students ever really needed were just typical computers so my
equipment budget was $0. The NSF expects such equipment to be covered
by the F&A costs. It is common for researchers in other other fields
to budget for expensive, specialized equipment though.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
If you don't spend the money, it goes back to the government. You can
request a "no-cost extension" from the NSF that seems to be
automatically approved (at least the first time) that gives you an
additional year to wrap things up. I did this. You also have some
wiggle room to move funds between the budgeted categories which I put
unneeded stress on myself to not do.
My budgets are probably as simple as they get. They really aren't
difficult to understand once you learn the jargon.
Take a look at my other academic posts:
* My NSF CAREER proposal
* What a $500,000 grant proposal looks like
* My future teaching statement
* The pain points of teaching computer science
* Leaving academia
* Lessons from my PhD
* All my career rejections
* Faculty interview questions I asked and got asked