Comment by uolmir
6 hours ago
> In fact up until a recent funding method change from the Trump Administration, most grant money was subject to "overhead"--a nebulous nonsensical accounting trick that allowed the university administration to get upwards of 60% of the dollars that are earmarked for grants.
We're better than this here. Don't spread misinformation. First of all overhead is listed as a percentage, such as 55% or 60% or whatever but the university doesn't get that fraction of the total grant. You work up the so called direct costs, ie the line item salaries of the researchers, the reagents, etc. and then the overhead is 60% of that figure. So it would work out to be 38% of the total dollars granted.
It's also not a trick. It's a negotiated amount that is supposed to avoid each grant requesting some amortized fraction of the cost of office space and other necessary but shared expenses.
I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.
I and most people agree that's it's possibly too high, but it's ignorant to treat it like a scam.
The fact that it is so high is a scam.
It really depends on the grant. For the larger grants, it may work somewhat like you describe. For the smaller grants, they literally do just take 60% of the money (and complain that it is not enough to administer the grant while providing absolutely no support whatsoever). In theory, it's paying for salary and office space and whatnot, but those are already covered by other budgets.