Altering the deal on existing contracts without notice is very much NOT a good idea. That they're attempting to do so is a pretty good sign of bad faith.
A $8M grant doesn’t cost a university any more than a $1M grant for university admin in terms of “indirect costs”. The fact that they think they’re entitled to several million of it to waste on things that shouldn’t be coming from taxpayer funded NIH grant money is obscene.
Sure it does. An 8M grant is going to have roughly 8X more researchers working under it than a 1M grant. Each of those researchers needs space, parking, IT support, HR supports, etc. There are some economies of scale, but the idea that you could increase the staffing of a business by 8x and not have to hire more HR and accounting people is silly.
This isn’t some conspiracy theory. Look at how much grant money a given university brings in annually and ask yourself if 30-60% of that number is being spent on overhead related to research. It’s not.
I wonder if it is possible for them to connect funding to a maximum allowed ratio of admin to prof / lectures
This detail is worth highlighting. NIH has traditionally borne the bulk of indirect costs, allowing non-profits to issue grants with low indirect costs. Slashing NIH’s indirect costs will force research institutions to seek funds elsewhere or become financially unviable.
NIH does not pay full salary support for many junior and senior scientists even if they work 100% on NIH projects. That is indirect support by the institution to NIH.
15% will kill academic medical research — the fountain head of a much or most progress we have made in preventing and treating a wide range of diseases.
I was first surprised that NIH put indirects on top and wondered if they were done NSF style if that would help control costs more.
How can they possibly shoulder the costs with their $40,000/yr tuitions and multi-billion dollar endowments?
The original grant notice is a good thing to read. They properly justify the cuts, and I think it's something that a lot of people would agree with - why is up to 70% of grant money being sent to "administration and overhead" at giant private universities? My small LLC is currently applying for an SBIR grant, and we were capped to 40% unless we provided a big justification - which we can't, because we're too small to justify anything like that. Meanwhile, big organizations and universities can throw their weight around and bully the government into handing them more money to do who-knows-what with. Maybe build a nice shiny new sports center with.
This is a good reform - even though it will cost my LLC about $75k in indirect costs that we might have been able to bill (40% -> 15%). I'm more confident in my ability to reduce our indirect costs and compete on a level-playing field with everyone else.
Also, indirect costs are not going to building sports centers. Funding agencies and the government audit universities in detail to make sure that the money is being spent only on research activities, down to calculating the amount of square footage per building that is being used exclusively for research, as opposed to instruction or clinical work. They have absolutely come after people and institutions, and successfully obtained multimillion dollar settlements, for using federal money to cover unrelated expenses. If NIH indirects were found to be going towards something like building a rec center or a facility for college athletes, it would be actual fraud and a national scandal, potentially on the “congressional inquiry” level.
When the country is $1,830,000,000,000 further in debt every year, universities will simply have to figure it out.
I suggest cutting their bloated administrations, to free up tuition and endowment funds for their actual purpose.
The federal budget (save DOD and entitlements) is stuff like this.
Saying “oh well, it’s just 0.25%” is the reason why nobody can tackle the deficit.
Do this 100x and you’ve suddenly reduced the deficit by 25%.
They'll lean on international students first like they have for decades, but those numbers are going to be down. They'll follow that by leaning on undergrads, but those numbers are shrinking too because of cultural and demographic shifts. Then they'll cut graduate funding (again) to try and get more blood from the stone. Then they'll try cutting the "extraneous" departments that don't bring in money or grants (read: everything except engineering, medicine, law, and football) again. Then they'll cut the departments that do bring in money. Then they'll do the work to shoulder the costs directly.
If you want reform, cutting funding doesn't work. It hollows out the entire institution before it even starts addressing the administrative issues. Reform needs to come from a different direction.
https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-25-0...
We have a saying in Japan that goes: "Even dust piled up will make a mountain."
Considering the monies concerned here are also tax dollars, I am wholly unsympathetic to the actual monetary sums. They could be 1 cent and my feelings on this matter wouldn't change: Audit every single line item and slash anything wasteful.
Collateral damage is unavoidable, and more importantly I don't care about collateral damage since we are finally getting the audits and cuts we the people demanded for way too long.
I understand the concerns around using funds effectively, and I agree there's a lot of waste out there, but some of that is just required in the research space to learn. If we knew what to fund to do something, it's no longer research, it's engineering.
Overhaul the grant system to ensure that there's additional scrutiny in getting funding, focus on outcomes we want, audit the past research, but burning it all down doesn't help and just wastes what's currently in flight and we'll have to rebuild eventually, duplicating effort and thus wasting money.
I understand the emotional reaction, but it would do everyone a lot of good to take a step back, take a deep breath, and approach things in a measured and focused way.
What a wonderful phrase that came into prominence to euphemise the killing of hundreds of thousands to millions of innocent Afghans and Iraqis.
I believe your use of it here is equally appropriate considering what you’re suggesting.
I’m guessing none of you our your loved ones will be affected by that “collateral damage”.
Fixed that for you. Pharma companies do lots research. But the goal of that research is very narrow - to bring new therapies to the market. The Academy has very different goals - train next generation of researchers and make discoveries. IMO, expecting a pharma company to do the work of an academic institution is a recipe for failure. But that is just an opinion.
