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Comment by _gmax0 | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical of the accuracy of those numbers. I feel like there's oftentimes little accountability in the nebulous academic bureaucracy.

An extreme case from earlier this year, in which a university employee was caught stealing: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/29/1089525660/a-former-yale-empl...

How much of this happens on a per-employee basis? What is the expected value of loss if everything is tallied and reconciled?

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High end universities regularly mark up most expenses charged to research grants by about 75%. This is the result of negotiations between the university and the government.

Nongovernmental grantors will sometimes negotiate much lower overhead. I suspect the negotiation goes “here’s $1M to a prestigious professor, and you may not touch it. We’ll give you $100k to make you feel better. Take it or leave it. By the way, if you leave it, we will happily offer the same research group $1M if they pack their bags and move to a different university.”

Wise professors with grants with differing overhead schedules will, of course, allocate charges to minimize the university’s cut.

If the donation is structured as an unrestricted gift, many universities take <5% as overhead. The nature of such gifts is that they cannot have, well, restrictions. So you can’t ask for deliverables or any other guarantees that might go along with a normal contract.

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