Comment by stefan_
2 days ago
If universities fund it themselves they might forego some of the usual 30% administrative grift and we get some 40 projects out of it!
2 days ago
If universities fund it themselves they might forego some of the usual 30% administrative grift and we get some 40 projects out of it!
Most of that "grift" goes to salaries for professors, staff, for the very expensive lab space, pensions and health care for the professors, etc.
These rates are all highly negotiated and highly justified down to details. The average professor may not know how much overhead goes into actually running lab space and paying for all the infrastructure that's necessary for research, but it's not insubstantial.
People who know nothing about that side of the business, even professors at universities, say "that's outrageous, let's cut it" without even understanding where the money goes. It's a very DOGE view, and a disastrous one to act on without first understanding the particulars.
I don't know how to comment on this considering you don't seem to know that the majority of research staff salaries in highly successful labs is paid entirely through grant money.
"administrative grift" as you call it is on top of awarded amounts, not a part of it. If the University is forced to spend all $3M themselves and also forego the operating overhead, what you'll get isn't more projects but fewer projects and also smaller, less capable research organizations.
Which is what some people want, but other people recognize that more research, bigger projects, and large, world-class academic organizations capable of conducting it are part of maintaining strong national security. Such activities are not cheap, they are also not profitable, but again because they are crucial for national security, it's the government's prerogative and obligation to help fund such activities, even if you consider it grift.
Note that it depends on the grant if indirects are included in the award amount or on top; NIH is the latter.
The increase in F&A rates is due to the facilities portion, which in the "before times" was negotiated every 4 years with DHHS and had concrete data in the negotiation process to help ensure it was fair. The admin portion for universities has been capped at 26% since 1991.
I see comments like this where destructionists have their simplistic bullshit releasing on full-spread, and it reminds me to go back and upvote the article. HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected, giving us the possibility of discussing how to move past this societal mental illness.
> HN is one of the few places where this feel-good nonsense actually gets rejected
Something I learned a long time ago is that it doesn't matter how well you argue a point with a nincompoop, they will simply shrug and repeat their horseradish verbatim in the next thread, hoping that next time they don't attract an audience with as much critical thinking. Unless you are willing to waste as much time as they are arguing on the internet, it's a fruitless endeavor.
It's really up to the moderators of a social space to keep bad faith nincompoops out, and Hacker News has shown themselves to be complicit and unwilling to do what is necessary to prevent its own enshittification. At this point, this place is just Reddit with a tone policing and a nuclear downvote button.
The way I think about it is that the person I'm arguing with online is not really the person I'm trying to persuade; I'm trying to persuade the rest of the people reading.
The tech community was the source of the largest threat to American science in a century. As cheesy as it sounds, I think its my duty to counter the lazy talking points that otherwise go unaddressed in these circles.
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It would be so nice if the mods kept people out who hold views that threaten your worldview. Keep that money flowing into your useless academic toy.
The mods here are worse than complicit. Dang in the past has allowed threats of violence while warning/deleting/banning petty name calling in the responses. It’s frankly disgusting.
Hacker News is Reddit with a tech-supremacy mindset.
More nonsense - indirect costs fund shared facilities, equipment, supplies, and data resources. To the extent that there is bloat, it funds the compliance that they are required by law to do. I would support simplifying this to reduce regulatory cost; I do not support paranoid whining.
The ratio has just been going up and up and up, and to suggest it pays for "equipment, supplies and data resources" is a bad joke considering the people doing the work end up saddled with yet more administrative bloat in the form of hostile, complicated processes in accessing the funds to buy the very equipment and supplies that enables the research.
> The ratio has just been going up and up and up
That's because organizations get bigger as projects become more complicated and varied. Larger organizations require more overhead as a percentage of the operating costs. 30 years ago many schools didn't even have Computer Science departments. Today schools are now starting to stand up Artificial Intelligence departments. It's not cheap to maintain these organizations.
Anyway, it really comes down to a simple tension: you can have big science, good science, or cheap science. Choose two.
For a long time we've optimized for big and good. This has yielded dividends in terms of science and technology output, but it's very expensive. Yet, the ROI is decidedly, emphatically positive.
For some reason people seem to think we can do this all cheaper, somehow, by pulling funding and making all these organizations smaller. I don't see how this is possible, because it relies on an uncanny ability to predict which projects will succeed and fail ahead of time.
What I think will happen is the money will dry up, the talent will go to places that want to spend the money, and the remaining programs will be cheap, small-stakes research better suited for the 20th century, unable to compete with countries that actually want to invest in the future.
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