Sure, the classic teaching buyout, where you pay the university some percentage of your salary (+ benefits, etc.) to reduce your course load. Professors are still expected to do some teaching, as noted. Maybe. (As opposed to people with different titles, like Senior Researcher.)
Or then there’s the deal Asimov struck, where he agreed that the university could cut all of his salary, so long as he maintained his official status, so he could spend all of his time on popular writing.
There’s the tenure-track positions that are research/scholarship, teaching and service
Assistant Professor, Associate Professor (usually given tenure at this point), and Professor
Educational or Teaching Track where bulk of duties are teaching and service. No tenure given, but ranks follow the same as tenure-track. People usually paid less, but it’s full-time with chance for promotion and raises. Position pretty stable for large universities unless there’s catastrophic budget issues because these people teach many sections of large undergraduate courses.
Research Track only. This may be only for science faculty. Duties are research but may include teaching if faculty wishes. Pay is less than tenure-track, but position may be less stable because they’re rarely given any hard money. They depend on grants, either on their own and/or a large lab run by a prolific principal investigator.
Full-Time Lecturer. Teaching only. Usually hired to teach certain courses or labs. Probably less stable than an educational track position, but I’ve known people who have kept these positions for a long time. No chance for promotion though.
Adjunct. Slave labor. Can only teach so many hours. No benefits. Adjuncts in professional fields like medicine or nursing get extra pay or they’d never be able to hire someone. Some schools will pay math and sciences more than humanities, but still not that great. I wonder how long this will last in the sciences because we have been unable to recruit enough qualified chemistry adjuncts.
This is completely different from the overhead Chronos mentions. A grant may or may not buy someone out of teaching courses. (And if you’re really good, buying out of teaching all courses. Something the university is frequently happy with.)
Overhead, on the other hand, is a fixed percentage of the grant. I’ve seen it as high as 40%. Doesn’t matter what the grant money is going to, the university takes its cut to keep the lights on.
(I remember once a grant admin telling me they had X bucks left for me. We had to reverse calculate the overhead, then figure out how to allocate the remaining money to various uses. Then put it all into the grant budget like it was done by the usual method.)
One thing that just got to me was when a student said to me “My tuition pays your salary.” No it didn’t you clueless dip. In Computer Science most if not all of our budget came from grants. At one school, for instance, the college paid 20+k to the department for office supplies and a half secretary. All our salaries came from grants which we hustled to get. And out of those grants the school was taking its overhead cut which was much, much greater than what they gave back.
I’ve seen indirect cost rates of over 50%. But that’s calculated on salaries & benefits only, not the whole grant.
Most of our soft-money folks taught a class or two, but that was purely because they wanted to. They got paid a pittance for it from the university, much less than they were getting from their grants. And nobody would have thought twice about it if they hadn’t chosen to teach any classes.
Although many institutions have both “Lecturer” and “Senior Lecturer” positions, with the latter having more pay and status including increased time between reappointment reviews, which at some point becomes effectively similar to tenure.
Charging it on all direct charges other than equipment is common – UVA: “direct salaries and wages, applicable fringe benefits, materials and supplies, services, travel and up to the first $25,000 of each subaward (regardless of the period of performance of the subawards under the award.)” And IME >50% is standard for large research universities. UVA’s is 61.5%.
Yeah, for large research universities, 50% is essentially a minimum.
Used to be 33% at Rice some decades ago when I was still a young’un, but it’s up to 56.5% these days.
This is the current practice at Yale. Also if you are hired as an assistant professor but have not yet defended your dissertation, you will start as a lecturer with the presumption you will become an assistant professor in two years. Yale has (or at least had) a rule that you must finish the dissertation within two years or your appointment is canceled.
One, perhaps the main, reason that the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) was created was so that Economics and related professions could apply for a grant through them rather than their university. It charges a much lower overhead. This made some sense as the overhead cost of economics research is generally much less than that of the hard sciences where labs are required.
Experimental hard sciences require a laboratory, but theoretical don’t. And even experimental sciences might not use a laboratory at the university they work at. Think of all of the astronomers who make a career on NASA data, or particle physicists who use Fermilab or CERN data.
They all still get charged the same overhead, though.
Yeah, the presence or absence of labs doesn’t typically drive university support costs for a group. Things like administrative staff, building and grounds maintenance, computing, student and scientist salary support, etc., exist for all researchers, and there is also the entire rest of the university’s operations costs which overhead goes into supporting. Sure, some groups might have lab equipment, but that equipment is typically not on the university’s dime anyway but rather the grant agencies (with some exceptions, of course.) I can’t imagine an economist at my university trying to argue that they should have lower overhead rates than me!
It is, however, taking up space that is on the university’s dime. Never mind other space for performing work. In grad school we had a full bench and fume hood per person, plus space for glove boxes and instruments. Had I been just modeling chemistry all day, my desk would have been sufficient.
My point is just that that is not a driver of the cost of doing business, i.e. it’s a relatively small fraction of what indirect costs (overhead) goes into. The PI with the fume hoods and the PI without both need general space for grad students and postdocs (whether it’s a desk or a lab bench), group-to-group interaction space like seminar rooms or kitchenettes, janitorial services for the restrooms and common areas of the building, grounds and building maintenance, salary/stipend/tuition support for students, postdocs, staff engineers, faculty – and that’s only the stuff associated directly with the research group and environs. The full rest of the university costs a lot to run: library, athletic facilities, dining facilities, common IT facilities and staff, grant management office, health services, records, campus mail, the entire educational program of the school (instructors, classrooms, materials), special programs and events, etc., etc.
At the end of the day, indirect costs can be a major input to a research university’s budget. But, whether I happen to have a lab or not is a tiny piece of the costs side of the university’s budget.
Your “point” includes both direct costs and costs associated with other indirect pools, neither of which have anything to do with the organized research F&A rate unless a university has managed to pull a fast one on DHHS CAS or ONR.
For most schools, take the published rate, subtract 26% for admin, and you’re left with the facilities rate, which was allocated to organized research based on percent use and square footage.
Why the quotes?
Aside from a couple of those items that can be direct costs or not, depending, all of those items are expenses the university incurs while operating a supportive and fully functional research university. Sure, the cognizant oversight agency is only interested in setting F&A rates based on a small subset of those expenses, but that is irrelevant once that revenue stream is established. My existence as a functioning faculty member, and my group members’ existence, and all the admin staff’s existence, etc., all requires all of that other stuff, so it’s all the real cost of support, regardless of what portion of it drives the F&A rate and regardless of how that rate is negotiated or calculated.
And thus, my sponsored awards have the same overhead rate on them as anyone else’s at the same place. I don’t know of any research university where that’s not the case.
Because attempting to justify the notion that the space being used is a small portion of indirect costs by including irrelevant costs like postdoc salaries and dining facilities isn’t actually a point; it’s just wrong. A large portion (at UVA it’s ~half of the actual rate and ~60% of the admin-capped rate) of overhead on organized research is from facilities. Some research requires more space per person than other research and thus costs the university more per person to have and maintain that space. The existence or not of athletic facilities doesn’t change this, because overhead on research is not for supporting athletic facilities.
Nor I. Not have I suggested it be changed.
Universities often have a separate, lower rate charged for off-campus work. Sometimes it’s just the 26% admin rate. And indirect charges on subcontracts are typically just applied on the first $25k or so.
“Whether I happen to have a lab or not is a tiny piece of the costs side of the university’s budget.” That doesn’t say “indirect costs”. It says “costs”. I’m not talking about the costs that are assessed in the F&A rate calculation. Those establish the size of that revenue stream – designed for recovery of some specific costs in a formulaic way – but the original statement I made that you pushed back against was that all PIs should (and, IME, always do) get charged the same indirect cost rate on sponsored awards, regardless of space taken up. If you agree with that, then we agree.
I pushed back on no “should” statements because you didn’t make one (you “can’t imagine” an economist making one) and, this being FQ, neither did I. You made the factually incorrect statement that “the presence or absence of labs doesn’t typically drive university support costs for a group.” Athletic facilities, etc., are not “university support costs for a group.” The university’s overall budget is irrelevant to the support costs for a group.
Likewise, the cost of running, say, 3M’s $8B manufacturing business is irrelevant to its cost to run a DOE-sponsored fuel cell membrane research program.
Research overhead does not, as you wrote, go into supporting the “entire rest of the university’s operations costs”. It goes into supporting research. And the amount of university support that research requires varies based on how much space it needs. There is no “should” there, just fact. The “should” largely comes down to convenience; 2 CFR 200 allows for less complicated accounting.