[thelittlenag]

My wife was hired last year as a full time professor and leads her own lab. By far the largest pressure on new faculty is the ability to get money into her lab, and by extension the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets). Getting approved for the money via the grant process means having published "interesting" research along avenues of inquiry that other folks find worth pursuing. Often times this means building on existing lines of research over pursuing new paths.

The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers, collaborate to push existing lines of inquiry, write lots of hopefully approved grants, and grow a lab into what is effectively a "successful small business". Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

The incentives for everyone involved is just a complete and total mess. I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants". Had she been, then she would have found herself hired immediately somewhere because universities are incentivized to play a numbers game and get as many folks in writing grants as possible.

[exmadscientist]

> the university since they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets)

Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants). So the University helpfully launders the money for you through a kickback from its overhead cut, at the tiny tiny price of keeping most of it. You may then spend the kickbacks without restriction.

The whole system is insane. Even having lived it for years I barely believe some of my own stories.

[CamperBob2]

Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants)

Sadly, that bit of goofiness goes back a long way. It's why the early HP desktops were sold as "calculators." Many important customers told them that buying a computer required approval from the board of directors, but anybody could buy a "calculator" out of petty cash.

[tnecniv]

Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that.

I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.

[zhdc1]

> Don't forget that this is actually money laundering. Our NIH grants had major strings attached, like "you may not buy non-instrumentation computers" (at least, that's what I was told, I did not actually get to read the grants).

The EU does it better. At least with the old Horizon 2020 scheme, up to 20% of the grant amount could be set aside for overhead costs. Anything more would get flagged if the grant was ever audited.

This limited how much participating universities could repurpose. I don’t know how Horizon EU is set up, but my guess is that it follows the same approach.

[analog31]

In a lot of departments, employees are unofficially expected to buy computers out of their own pockets. Workers are often quite incensed about this.

In turn the employees have a "fuck you" attitude about it. They often buy the cheapest laptop, and won't let their department's IT person touch it. As a result, most work is done with things like out-of-date OS's and software versions, and ad-hoc security and backups.

[robwwilliams]

Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.

[Fomite]

"you may not buy non-instrumentation computers"

This will come as a shock to the three laptops, one desktop, one server and five cluster nodes I have purchased on various grants.

Also the "kickback" as you put it (aka indirect cost returns) vary wildly both between and within universities. For example, we get zero indirect cost returns, but do get money back for unallocated spending if we bring in a higher percentage of our salary than we are obligated to.

[mjburgess]

What amuses, and irritates, me is that academics frequently project this insanity onto Business or The Profit Motive.

Having close connections in academia, that world is the worst of what can be imagined. A highly competitive start-up, or scale-up, environment has a level of Reason and Merit imposed by the market which rationalises most everything (even the insane VC fantasyland headline-driven stuff is intelligible).

Academia is the worst combination of every imaginable macro force.

[pxmpxm]

Is this a recent thing? Many many years ago I did work for a NIH funded study and we had no issues buying machines, with the stipulation that the servers have to be Sun Ultras for some reason.

[KennyBlanken]

So, if you're complaining about this in an HN comment, that means you reported it to the NIH, right? Because "kickbacks" are not a common thing, friend.

[godelski]

> Don't forget that this is actually money laundering.

For anyone questioning this line, let's remember a few things

- Graduate students (in this setting) are typically funded, so the cost of their credits (often higher than undergrads) are determined by the university and such costs are a major factor of what is taken out of the grant the professor gets their portion (sometimes after the uni's cut!). The rest then goes to the student's salary and hopefully some left over for new lab equipment.

- Grant money must all be used and cannot be put aside for future investments. It is better to buy shitty lab equipment because you don't have enough for good equipment and can't invest any excess (even if by being spartan elsewhere). If you don't use the money in the allotted timeframe you're considered to have improperly managed the funding.

- A funded graduate student is considered 49% employee and 51% student.

- Graduate students in year 3+ (median 5 years for PhD) are not taking courses and doing full time research and likely being a TA at the same time. (Tuition costs do not change)

- A successful graduate student sees their advisor less and less as they dive into their niche area of research where the advisor no longer has any level of expertise. (This is what's supposed to happen)

- When a graduate student stops taking classes they still pay for credits and at the same rate (albeit through funding, which they are often writing for at this point. But prof gets the award).

- Universities pay students and professors to publish papers and judge success by publication in venues

- Students and professors "judge" works submitted to venues by other students and professors for no pay (i.e. on university time)

- Venues take copyright ownership over works they deem valuable and put it behind a paywall

- Universities pay for access to venues where their researchers published in and where their researchers performed volunteer service for.

- Promotions are given to those who's name is on the most works, regardless of position or contribution to that work.

Think about it this way, what if we framed this as a job? Your job considers you a junior part time employee for the first 5 years and if you don't complete all 5 years every other job will treat you as a junior part timer. Your first two years 50% of your time is spent doing training, 50% of your time is spent teaching the interns (who pay, but who spend 100% of their day training), and whatever time you have left is spent performing research. You're told you're a part time employee because 51% of your time is training. After two years you finish training but get no change in pay (maybe +$100/mo), nor graduate to a full time employee. By year 4 your manager never shows up except few months your manager comes around telling you that you need to make sure to make a deadline and they need to read your report first. They demand it is in their hands a week early so they can review it. 3am the night before the deadline they ask for major rewrites, this is the first you've heard of any problems. 10 minutes past the deadline you're still getting requests to "modify the graphic" with instructions like "a little to the left" or "I don't like the colors" and the iterative process can only be performed by back and forth submissions with random delays as your manager won't touch the source code. Every few months your manager stops by to check on progress and ask you to write a report that needs to be written by tomorrow. They'll slap their name at the top and if successful they advance their career. Your reward is via proxy. After 5 years, you write a large report about what you did the last 5 years filled with stuff you've mostly done over the last 18 months and pretend that you had a plan all along. If they approve, they usually do (but will ask for changes), you can go be a manager if you're lucky or get a full time position. Or if you go the post-doc route, 75% employee.

Idk, this sum it up pretty well? Anyone want to add anything?

[stavros]

I don't understand this comment. So basically, I have a bunch of dirty money, I give it to a university, who then use all of it to buy a bunch of stuff that my own company sells, thus cleaning the money? So basically what I've done is I've given away $X million of stuff, and my company gets its 5% margin out of it?

This makes zero sense to me.

[tombert]

My dad used to be a full time professor of aerospace engineering. He liked the research, and he didn't mind teaching, but he quit after a few years because he absolutely hated having to play "salesman" all the time. He found himself seeing everyone as "potential funding", and he personally found it kind of hard to turn that mentality off.

He went back to industry after that, which has its share of legitimate problems, but at least they don't typically expect their engineers to also be sales people.

Also universities pay shit.

[fritzo]

Is that true that aerospace engineers are not expected to act as sales people? I've certainly found that in software, engineers who don't sell their work get reassigned or laid off.

[bachmeier]

> they take a very hefty cut (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets

This leads to some very interesting conversations at universities.

"Your department doesn't bring in many grants, so we can't grant your budget request."

"But grants aren't revenue. They're money used to cover the expense of doing research."

"Yes, but they bring in overhead."

Then when the granting agencies try to cut overhead:

"We can't afford a cut in overhead. That money is used to cover the cost of doing research. We'd be losing money."

[cvwright]

Even more baffling, there are studies showing that most US universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research.

Yes, the overhead rates are obscene, but somehow the compliance costs are even greater.

[renewiltord]

American universities are a fantastic scheme. I'm working on a project right now to see if I can bring this to high schools. They're a massive machine to move money from taxpayers into certain organizations very effectively. That's why you'll see that the loudest voices for student loan forgiveness go to these universities. Come on, you have a Divinities degree from Harvard? That's a fictional thing. Of course you're advocating for student loan debt discharge by the taxpayers. Ideally, if you're running the university, everyone gets $1 m to spend on university, and you charge $1 m.

Once we get school vouchers going we can do that for high school too. It's going to be a revolution, man. Pure money printing.

And what's anyone going to try to say? You can't touch US universities or schools. Education is important! I think I could probably give one or two poor kids a scholarship and trot them out every now and then.

[ilya_m]

> I'm reading tea leaves here, but my guess as to why she was never hired is that she was deemed "unable to get grants".

Rest assured, this is exactly what happened. University administrators have no expertise, interest, or motivation to identify and invest in promising research direction - they outsource this task to funding agencies. The only signal universities are extremely skillful in reading is dollar amounts.

I do not necessarily criticize this setup. Think of a research university as a start-up accelerator of sorts. Its main task is to give resources to secure sources of funding, not provide funds themselves.

[GabeIsko]

It's a big picture issue though, right? Where else is scientific research supposed to be conducted? It can't all be profitable.

Not that I know how to manage a research department or anything. But it is a bad sign if even prestigious universities have a poor grip on what important scientific research is beyond "what makes us money".

In this instance we are talking about UPenn. Wharton is a pretty productive wallstreet pipeline. If they can't use their endowment to fund important scientific research, it is a massive problem.

[godelski]

> Quality is an after thought taken care of __by what passes for peer review__.

I can feel the strong disdain in these words that can only be expressed by someone close to the academic world. I've honestly decided to just stop using the phrase all together because it's just a misnomer and not meaningful at this point other than a metrics for the bureaucrats.

[kurthr]

I'm sure you'll find lots of people at her school who know the game, but for everyone else who hasn't heard.

In order to get good grants you need to run "successful" experiments, which means you need to propose to find something interesting, but that means you want to already know there's something interesting there. That means you really need to bootstrap to have already run enough of the experiment that you know where it's going to go, before you write the grant for the money to run the experiment (and analyze the results, write papers, pay grad students, etc). You also need the money to run enough of the experiments for the new proposals you're going to write next so that they are "successful". Running experiments and not getting interesting results will lead to not getting future grants, because those handing out money have memories.

Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built. Of course managing this is such a full time job before even teaching, that you'll be totally overwhelmed and delegating almost all of the research, papers, and grant writing to senior students. Once you get tenure you can slim back down to about 5 students.

Also, if you come from a national lab or somewhere that gives you experience writing proposals (and preferably reviewing them) that is a huge advantage since you know exactly what the other reviewers are looking for. Once you write successful proposals and papers, you'll be invited to the committees and review other papers for important journals in your field. Of course a lot of this is again a bootstrap and treadmill problem.

[godelski]

> Second thing. The best way to get tenure is to have such a huge group working for you (e.g. 30 grad students), because the provost will be terrified there isn't room for other grant writers in the department to get the money to support them and the lab you've built.

There's another factor too. More students means more papers and your h-index goes up. Were we to suppose that all students were equal and that there is a noise associated with the likelihood of publication and another noise with the number of citations then if either of those noise variables are large, you should maximize quantity over quality. Because you're simply increasing the odds that you'll hit a jackpot.

In fact, if you pull the data from csrankings.org you'll find that the first 30 (all I pulled because I'm lazy and not a web person) school's rank is practically a function of the number of publishing professors at that university. So the "more workers = more better" tactic actually scales from lab to department. If we look a little harder, I think we can all see the limitation of the metrics being used here and why they're so easy to hack. More importantly, why these metrics result in a dominating momentum force (aka. rich get richer). Maybe we should start reevaluating how we are evaluating systems. After all, it is neither fair nor an efficient usage of resources. If we're going to continue the trend though, the only solution is to allocate more resources... (which to be fair the pool of available resources is increasing year over year, but the allocation isn't)

[Fomite]

Sitting on our tenure and promotion committee, I'd be extremely skeptical about someone having 30 graduate students doing a good job supervising them, and we consider having a lab of 3-5 students to be fairly productive for a pre-tenure faculty member.

I think the causation is reversed - if you're successful enough at writing grants, which involves convincing your peers that your research is that good, to support 30 graduate students, you've already met the qualifications for tenure which involves convincing your peers that your research is good enough to want you in their department for as long as possible.

Personally, my work load is worse post-tenure.

[IshKebab]

Definitely the case. A Nobel prize comes from one great discovery. An academic career comes from ongoing successful grant applications.

[WalterBright]

This is hilarious. I've been lectured by several PhD's that insist the NSF is an unbiased organization, doling out grants based purely on scientific merit.

Of course, it is nothing of the sort.

[justinclift]

> The hiring process is setup basically to filter for folks who they think are the most likely to publish lots of papers ...

In Australia, it did seem to be that way up until maybe a year or so ago.

These days however there seems to be far greater emphasis on hiring people from er... "diverse" backgrounds, over everything else. Strongly preferred to be non-male too.

Don't even bother applying if your a Caucasian male, regardless of your qualifications, academic history / publishing record, etc.

Note - that's not just a random impression, that's what I've been told by friends working at major Aust Uni's when they want to vent.

And yeah, it's as bad as that sounds. :(

[contrarian1234]

I'm not in the same field, nor in the USA, but I've found the incentives usually work but there is a misunderstanding of the role of the professor.

All the professors I know have their teams pursuing multiple lines of work. Some are "safe" and some are more out there. A typical "safe" area is usually running some very expensive piece of equipment (like a mass spectrometer or something) b/c that automatically generates collaborations and gets your name on lots of papers. You need to mix and match and use the safer work to fund your more experimental ideas. They also basically never do too much research themselves. They will dip in and give suggestions and guidance and help out, but their primary role is to teach and act as a lab manager - directing students and postdocs to different areas of research. So in a way, if you're being a professor and personally deeply involved in the research, then you're "doing it wrong".

On a high level, at least from these popsci descriptions of her work, it kinda feels like Katalin Karikó was just not doing the professor role correctly? The fact she was working on this one problem (and seemingly nothing else?) is very surprising for a professor. Professors aren't just tenured post-docs. If you don't want to be a lab manager then I don't think being a professor is the job for you

[kevinventullo]

I guess the question I have is whether this is really the optimal setup. Shouldn’t we be encouraging more tenure-aged faculty to be getting their hands dirty with research?

[Fomite]

There are professors that choose to go this route. It is very risky, but if it pays off, it pays off big.

[robwwilliams]

> Quality is an after thought taken care of by what passes for peer review.

Cynical and generally wrong. Peer review of papers and grant applications is obviously far from perfect—-just like humanity and our messy cultures—-but it often works well nonetheless.

We read the horror stories but read less about shining successes.

[Kye]

Was it always like this or headed here? I'm curious if flat government funding for research against rising costs creates or amplifies counterproductive incentives.

[godelski]

A little of both. The problem is that evaluation of research work is insanely difficult. A lot of people think it's easy because "the world is objective, it either works or doesn't" but research is cutting edge and you're only chipping away at a much larger picture. It can take decades for a work to reveal itself as truly profound or utter shit. The problem, which I rant about in a longer comment, is that instead of acknowledging the noise we've embraced poor metrics and encouraged the hacking of those metrics. I call this Goodhart's Hell. People forget, metrics are models and all models are wrong. You have to constantly be questioning your metrics and determine how well aligned they are with your goals or else you'll drift (the environment moves, so your metric must move too).

I think actually the better way to solve this, which may seem paradoxical, is to actually increase funding. Not in size of single prizes for grants (well... we need that too, but that's another discussion), but in the availability. The reason being that the hacking is partially encouraged by the competition for a very scarce resource. A resource that compounds. Due to this (and some nuances, see other post) we're not actually rewarding those who perform the best work (we may actually be discouraging that) but those who become lucky. A "good work" is simply one with high citation counts, which is heavily weighted on the publicity around that work. Which is why top universities have big media departments, pay news publishers to advertise their works, and why survey papers generate huge counts.

The problem is that the system is rather complex and there are no simple or "obvious" solutions. "Good enough" is also not clear because too low order of an approximation can actually take you away from your intended goals, not a small step towards as one might think.

[lbeltrame]

50% for overheads? Is that university serious? Where I live grants that have more than 30% raise many, many eyebrows...

[ChuckMcM]

And this is also why I think the single biggest innovation starter billionaires could do would be to apply grant funds to new Professors for interesting research.

[golem14]

Not a billionaire, but of course this would be great. Are there good suggestions on how to do that without paying the university overhead AND being tax advantaged ?

I cannot just go and give Professor X $10K to do this research and claim a tax writeoff.

Are there existing nonprofits who do this ?

Are there Howtos on setting up such nonprofits ?

Genuinely interested. Not just for academia, even for open source. I can donate to the FSF, but if I want more people improving/maintaining emacs or vim and those people get paid for it, that's probably not the way, as the FSF does not do this sort of thing, I believe.

[KennyBlanken]

I'm sick of lies and misrepresentations from people who clearly don't know what they're talking about, talking like schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money.

First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent. The school/university is very restricted in what they can bill a lab for; for example, I worked somewhere that we couldn't charge for storage because that would have violated NIH's rules on double-billing, because the storage cluster was paid for via administrative overhead.

Chances are when someone says "I got a $1M grant to study bubblegum's effects on the gall bladder", they actually got $1M plus another $500,000.

Second, that money isn't being greedily stolen. That overhead help pays for, directly or indirectly, things like (notice I said "like", because I am not an expert in the exact rules around what can and cannot be paid for via overhead):

* the building

* the real estate the building sits on

* the utilities to keep the building lit and comfortable (which in the case of life/bio/chemistry sciences can be an enormous challenge given how much airflow lab space needs, which is far greater than office airflow...and then there's biosafety / chemical hoods)

* security, both equipment and staff (which can be substantial if the university or school does biomedical research in any sensitive areas such as stem cells, animal research, infectious disease, etc). This includes monitoring for equipment failure (for example, sample storage systems often have dry contact alarm hookups so that if they fail, security or facilities finds out ASAP and can alert people)

* the utilities to power equipment, such as -80 freezers (just one of which can use more energy than a US household)...most of us would also go pale if we saw the power bill for some physics labs) and other "utilities" like vacuum, purified water, etc.

* construction, maintenance, cleaning...both staff and supplies

* grounds maintenance, everything from mowing the lawn to leaf and snow removal

* technology costs - telephone and networking infrastructure and staff, server admins for everything from websites to email to storage to computational clusters, desktop support staff

* business administration, which includes, but is a lot more than just, payroll/benefits/HR. Grant writing/administration is often its own entire department, because you need people who not only know how to submit the paperwork, but frankly, also follow faculty around badgering them to fix or submit paperwork on time - faculty are incredibly lazy about this.

* all the services the lab's grad students, staff, postdocs, and faculty use and don't think anything about, like shuttle busses, the library, and so on.

[PheonixPharts]

Regarding your first point, was the parent comment edited or did you miss this part as they clearly address this issue:

> (50-100%! btw this doubles the "cost" of the grant, it doesn't lessen the amount the professor gets).

Parent comment isn't making the claim that "schools are greedily taking away poor Petey PhD's hard-earned grant money."

Rather bemoaning the fact that academic success (and even entry into the field at all) is very, very closely tied to the ability to generate revenue and more so the corollary that quality of research performed always at best takes a back seat, or at worst becomes a liability if it gets in the way of bringing in more money.

[WoodenChair]

> First off: grants from most places factor in the administrative overhead. That is negotiated between the school and the grant org. For the NIH, it averages fifty percent.

You write as if a 50% administrative overhead is healthy. In non-regulatory captured industries it's almost unheard of. Even most non-profits that are considered the best by Charity Navigator have administrative overheads of <20%.

[cycomanic]

It's funny how you accuse others of misrepresentation but are yourself misrepresenting.

Regarding overheads yes they pay for some of these things, but they also are clearly being used to prop up ever increasing administrative bodies (whose salaries have often grown disproportionately compared to academic staff).

Just some examples (and they are in physics/engineering and not the US so specifics are not directly comparable).

Professors had to pay the their salary + overheads on the percentage they worked on the project (those percentages often add up to to more than 100%, while not reducing teaching load).

Regarding rent, one of my colleagues compared the rates to rent in the prime location in the city centre and they were significantly higher. This is despite the fact that the buildings were often paid through large grants (who were often written by academics) and land was owned by the university.

In another case, I know of some universities were the biggest business unit was the real estate management unit (they were lucky as a university with significant land in the CBD of one of the most expensive cities in the world. In that country the university could not charge the academics for rent (funding rules), so instead the academics were put in the smallest space possible because renting out was more profitable. The money from renting also never was used for running the university.

Regarding paperwork, you call academics lazy. What I have seen is that almost all systems around reporting are designed to make life for the administrators easy, while academic time is treated as free (as academics don't get paid overtime). As examples, as an academic if you spend money e.g. when travelling for a conference you have to keep the receipts to justify spending (no issue with that). After you had to fill out the accounting categorisation fields for every $ you spend, scan the receipts and send the originals and the scanned receipts plus some form that had to be filled in online but also printed (finance couldn't print apparently) to finance. The spending had the to be approved by at least one other academic (head of lab, school or faculty). A friend was made to write a statuary declaration I front of a justice of the peace, because a $6 receipt from subway didn't say it was a sandwich.

For a similar example from teaching. I was responsible for the final year projects in an engineering degree. The university required all grades to be in the system two weeks after end of term. Because the grade in this program depended on a report which was handed at the end of term and all academics were extremely busy with grading their own courses, it was essentially impossible to collect the grades before the deadline. What that meant is that for every student we had to fill out a grade amendment that had several pages. While I had admin help to fill the form, I still had to check every page, initial the page and sign the document for >300 students.

Admin at university is absolutely insane and not designed with the academics in mind.

I'll stop this rant here, because it's already way too long, but I just had to reply because the post above just reeks of how many "centralised admin" seem to think of academics as a cost centre that is lazy and doesn't do any work. At my university I know that when there were redundancies admin were complaining that they didn't fire the professors, because they don't do anything anyway.

[glitchc]

Total bs, all of this. Thank you for conveniently ignoring the major sources of revenue for a university, namely tuition, in particular international tuition, govt. funding and endowments. Overhead from grants is a tiny line item in comparison on the balance sheet.

The overhead is basically a tax on research and robs professors of valuable resources. It only goes to pay an ever-growing, over-bloated admin staff. This is coming from someone who has first-hand knowledge from both sides of the equation.

[raincom]

Your wife is on tenure-track and Kariko was on a lower track designed for postdocs, researchers, leading to research assistant/associate professor, etc. Kariko was treated badly on the track she was on——a track that doesn’t require stringent filtering. So your comment is not that relevant.