[HN Gopher] What does a research grant pay for?
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What does a research grant pay for?
Author : azhenley
Score : 35 points
Date : 2023-04-09 20:10 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (austinhenley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (austinhenley.com)
| samth wrote:
| This is an excellent breakdown. The one thing I would quibble
| with is the characterization of summer salary. It's better to
| think of the 9-month pay idea as an accounting trick that has two
| purposes: 1. A benefit for faculty, since they get to be paid
| extra if they get grants. 2. An accounting approach for the NSF
| to limit how much any one faculty member can get in grant funding
| and account to Congress that the faculty are actually
| participating in the research. It does, as the article says,
| create the possibility of significant swings in compensation,
| similar to a bonus scheme.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| Before I read the article, my first reaction was "People.
| Research grants pay for people('s salaries)." (And other things
| as well, but that's usually the biggest category)
|
| But apparently, in the author's university, a massive amount of
| goes to "overhead". That's quite surprising, in my opinion.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| this is true for every gov't grant! And it's always 20%+ at
| EVERY university
| azhenley wrote:
| It is the norm in the US. I'll share a few other overhead rates
| at well-known universities:
|
| - University of Tennessee, Knoxville (my former employer), 53%
|
| - University of Michigan, 56%
|
| - University of California, Berkeley, 57%
|
| - University of Texas at Austin, 58.5%
|
| - Harvard University, 69%
| alsodumb wrote:
| UIUC - 58.6%
|
| One thing that really annoys me as a grad student is the fact
| that the University charges tuition to my advisor even if I'm
| not taking any classes. Most PhD students finish their course
| work pretty quickly and don't take any classes after that and
| yet they get charged for tuition from the grant. The
| justification is that they're enrolled in thesis credits
| which is also a class but that's stupid imo, especially when
| the grad students don't get paid much. It's even more
| annoying when people say "oh your pay as grad student is low
| because technically you are getting free tuition.". Yeah no,
| I'm getting free tuition for like a year or two I take
| classes while I'm working there for 5 years.
|
| I also wish the funding agencies allowed more flexibility is
| terms of spending excess money in different categories. I was
| surprised to know that left over money from a grant that's
| supposed to pay for an an undegrad cannot be used to buy a
| faster computer for research related to the same project or
| maybe even pay for data labeling services like scale.AI. They
| wanted us to hire a much more expensive undegrad instead of
| using external data labeling services at much cheaper prices.
|
| Oh and also Fly America Act. Every federal grant requires you
| to use US airlines and I sometimes paid 2x what I would have
| paid otherwise (and only one of the author could do instead
| of 2 because of limited money).
| ordersofmag wrote:
| Except if you look at university budgets you'll see that most
| of that overhead ends up paying for...that's right. People.
| jdiez17 wrote:
| Right, there are a lot of administrators, janitors, technical
| support staff etc being paid by the university. But I'm
| surprised they aren't paid by the students tuition fees,
| since are so ridiculously high already.
| alsodumb wrote:
| There a too many administrators imo, who are often paid
| quite a bit. I don't think a University needs so many
| associate deans, assistant deans, and directors.
| Unfortunately it's people in those roles that make future
| hiring decisions so minimizing spending there isn't usually
| their goal.
| analog31 wrote:
| >>> 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.
|
| >>> ... 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.
|
| Indeed, people think that getting tenure means you can live on
| easy street, but a tenured prof with no funding is living a tough
| life. They can lose their research space and department-
| contributed equipment funding (if in a laboratory science, these
| can be significant), and travel money, plus get "stuck" with a
| heavy teaching load. At the same time, a prof who does want to
| focus their career on teaching pays a price for doing so.
| sega_sai wrote:
| Yes, that matches well my experience with NSF (in astrophysics).
| Most goes to the University in overheads + grad student + (maybe)
| postdoc, and a little bit to cover your summer salary (which is
| an insane concept if you ask me).
| jgeada wrote:
| There is a reason university administrative overhead has
| exploded over the past few decades: MBAs have found yet another
| vein of money to parasite themselves onto. I think this country
| will only start to get better when 90% of this management
| overhead is fired and forbidden to work in management ever
| again.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| This article is...very misleading, implying that "overhead" is
| (in some dirty or despicable way) "taken" by the university. It's
| not. The indirect costs are added to the grant, so if you get a
| $500k grant, the university gets an extra percentage. Sample
| citation: https://www.science.org/content/article/nih-plan-
| reduce-over...
|
| > The federal government has been adding indirect cost payments
| to research grants since 1947. Today, each university negotiates
| its own overhead rate--including one rate for facilities and one
| for administration--with the government every few years. Rates
| vary widely because of geography--costs are higher in urban areas
| --and because research expenses differ. Biomedical science, for
| example, often requires animal facilities, ethics review boards,
| and pricey equipment that aren't needed for social science. The
| base rate for NIH grants averages about 52%--meaning the agency
| pays a school $52,000 to cover overhead costs on a $100,000
| research grant (making overhead costs about one-third of the
| grant total). Universities usually don't receive the entire 52%,
| however, in part because some awards for training and conferences
| carry a lower rate, and because certain expenses such as graduate
| student tuition don't qualify.
|
| The author is also engaging in manipulative data presentation
| techniques (such as presenting the cost of a graduate student for
| five years, making it sound like an outrageously large $233,000,
| and not $46k/year, which when you factor in the number of hours a
| grad student typically works, is likely around federal minimum
| wage.)
|
| If anyone would actually like to read up about the subject, here
| are some starting points:
|
| https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/caar/indirect.jsp
|
| https://grants.nih.gov/grants/policy/nihgps/html5/section_7/...
|
| If the NIH gives you a "$5M" grant, you get the $5M _plus the F
| &A costs_. I don't know how NSF does it.
|
| There are a lot of rules around what grant money can and cannot
| be spent on, and the rules are specifically set up _to try and
| prevent administrators from taking more than what is reasonable
| for keeping the lights on, staff paid, etc._
|
| To everyone getting outraged in the comments about evil
| universities and schools 'stealing' research dollars: you are
| being manipulated by a computational researcher who likely is not
| even remotely aware of the costs of the infrastructure to support
| them, such as computational/storage clusters they utilize. Those
| clusters, if supported from F&A/indirect costs, often cannot have
| usage charges, because that would be "double dipping."
| pbj1968 wrote:
| This is a good post, and I'm glad to see someone knowledgeable
| commenting. Other federal agencies do tend to award in fixed
| amounts, so the intricacies of indirect can get very
| complicated. Foundation indirects aren't a debate worth having.
| They make the choice to pay indirects, the recipients will
| happily accept them.
|
| My main response to the author, though, is what exactly does he
| expect the grant to cover? It's paying for his time,
| infrastructure used, and the cost of supporting a grad student
| who's likely generating the bulk of the data. These are the
| very real expenses of his research...
| azhenley wrote:
| F&A comes out of NSF grants. If I get a 500K grant, the first
| 150k or so would have gone to my university. Some universities
| this overhead number would be lower, some higher, but it is
| taken out first.
|
| > _The author is also engaging in manipulative data
| presentation techniques (such as presenting the cost of a
| graduate student for five years_
|
| I shared the yearly/monthly breakdown the sentence before that:
| "It includes their salary ($2200 a month), tuition ($15,000 a
| year), and benefits ($200 a month)."
|
| I didn't post anything misleading or inaccurate. I included
| screenshots of my cumulative budget pages and included
| _specific numbers_ to make examples more concrete. Not making
| any claim as to whether F &A is evil or not (it's not).
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| You purposefully multiplied the grad student's compensation
| by five years to make it sound like a huge number.
|
| You purposefully cited the NSF as an example, and left out
| mention that the NIH (five times the funding of NSF) and
| numerous other organizations, provide for F&A overhead.
|
| You present the 30% "take" as being high, when it's actually
| very reasonable, and you clearly think it's all one giant
| waste of money. Heat, cooling, water, power, internet,
| computational clusters, internet connections? Those don't
| cost money! I don't have lab space! Why am I being charged
| overhead!?
|
| Over and over you're clearly manipulating readers to generate
| outrage. The whole piece is one giant bitch-fest; woe be the
| poor AI researcher!
|
| Do you not understand how you're fueling anti-science-
| research efforts? The level of threat scientific research
| funding is constantly under? And how one of the most frequent
| means of attack is the perceived wasteful overhead?
| alsodumb wrote:
| You seem to take this very personally.
|
| The author is a computational researcher, and most of his
| funding likely comes from NSF not NIH. Why would you expect
| him to write about how NIH grants work? Why would you
| expect him to write how things work in life sciences? If
| you have an issue with it write your own blog post and
| share it.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| Yes, that's why it's "overhead" because it's just the cost to
| play the game.
|
| But after overhead, even R01 grants which sound "massive" will
| just end up paying for a couple of PhDs and postdocs over four
| years at the end. But there's some "inflation" of overhead
| going on over the years, so the bang for your buck is
| dwindlding
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| This is something that varies widely by funding agency- you are
| correct that NIH grant budget limits are exclusive of
| indirects, but for the NSF the opposite is true. Different
| funders handle that differently, and additionally some funders
| have a cap on the indirect rate that they will allow. Many
| private foundations will only an indirect rate of 20%, for
| example. Some corporate grants that I've seen do not allow for
| any indirects at all.
|
| Depending on your institution, and how they do their
| accounting, this can have serious negative effects for
| investigators. At an academic medical center, the majority of
| PIs are NIH funded, so all of the accounting and finance
| planning for research assumes a 54% indirect cost rate- so if,
| for whatever reason, your portfolio of grants doesn't fit that
| mold, you can have issues. I have known PIs who had multiple
| very large grants from private foundations, and so were not
| producing the expected amount of indirects and ended up being a
| net negative to their department's bottom line. This caused
| them (and their department chair) all kinds of problems.
|
| Accounting and grant budgeting are two of the things that I
| wish I'd learned more about in grad school!
| jll29 wrote:
| Overhead is why your institution wants you to apply for grants,
| of course.
|
| Note the particularity of not paying professors over summer is
| only true for the USA. In Germany, for example, you will get 13
| monthly salaries for 12 months of work (the extra one is in
| November and helps one to pay for Christmas presents). What
| really matters in the end is one's quality of life for the annual
| net salary, of course.
|
| Thanks for uploading some sample documents - interesting to see
| how they look like in the US.
| avsteele wrote:
| This a decent write up. The SBIR budgets wind up looking similar.
|
| I can see how the indirect costs ("overhead") seem like ripoff to
| a professor, but even if you are running a private business
| having an indirect cost rate of 50% is considered low-to-normal.
| At least where I am: rent, utilities, cleaning, bathrooms, etc...
| are just expensive.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| IMHO it's outrage-bait from an AI researcher who is likely
| oblivious to the costs of the computing infrastructure they use
| and thinks the overhead being charged _on top of the grant
| award_ is outrageous because they don 't have lab space and
| such.
|
| Sadly, most researchers have zero appreciation for how much
| computing infrastructure costs, and how they think it's
| perfectly fine to store data for a several million dollar
| research grant, that involves multiple people's academic
| careers, on a USB hard drive they got at Best Buy because
| buying a proper server etc would cost too much.
|
| You can see their attitude in how outraged they seem to be
| about having to pay a grad student $46k a year...
| azhenley wrote:
| I only paid my students $26,000 a year (listed as $2200 a
| month in the post). I wish I could have paid them many more
| times that like they deserve!
| jhart99 wrote:
| I think one reason indirect costs get a bad rap is there are
| supplies that can only be paid for through overhead for example
| ... pens. Depending on the institute, getting anything back in
| terms of support can be tricky or down right impossible. It was
| so bad in one place, that we would all go out of pocket for
| notebooks and pens because the indirect portion was a black
| hole of nonsupport.
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