Comment by StableAlkyne | Hacker News Reader

Comment by StableAlkyne | Hacker News Reader

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Part of it is that research grants are not used fully as a research funding source - a typical university administration will skim about a quarter of every grant for "administrative costs." It's not called out as corruption because it's the norm, but it does have the effect of reducing the amount of tax-funded R&D dollars that actually make it to R&D

As a result, the people in charge of hiring and firing have a self-preserving interest to value grant-earners

It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.

It would also help lower some of the pressure to publish or perish, since a lot of that comes from the need to chase grants.

> It'll never happen, but if funding agencies like the NSF or NIH put strings on the funding like "100% must go to the PI awarded this grant" with accounting requirements, it would help remove some of the financial incentive.

From what I've seen in very limited searches, universities claim that the 30-60% overhead/administrative costs are to account for things like employee benefits, utility costs, building maintenance, and the like. The stated money pits all make sense to me, but I don't see how it actually comes up to those numbers.

Do you know if these costs are ever itemized by universities? That's probably a necessary first step before NSF/NIH would consider a rule to avoid paying opaque overhead costs. (Though I fear it would lead to absurd equipment rental fees or something of the sort. "You want to use a test tube? $3 per day per tube!")

I don't know how much accounting is done on the university side to itemize research bills. What my advisor told me was when I was going through the ringer was that once you have the money, it's yours - you can do whatever you want with it short of embezzlement. All that matters is you make progress on the thing the funding agency granted you the money for, doesn't matter if you ran over budget or spent $100.

I work at a state university, and how we spend our allocated funding, and whether we go over budget, both matter quite a bit.

There's an extensive negotiation period to arrive at these rates - universities don't get to just pick.

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