[jostmey]

I don't think many people (even graduate students and postdocs) realize how much money universities suck in with grants. For every RO1 a professor gets, the university gets to add a substantial (typically greater than 50%) indirect costs. The PIs don't care because their budget is the same, but what it means is that there are fewer grants being handed out. Then the PIs somtimes pay for the "training" that graduate students and postdocs get using their own funds. For a top university, this can be 50K/year.

[greeneggs]

That's not exactly how it works. If an agency wants to give a $1 million grant, for example, and the PI's university has a 60% overhead rate, then the PI will draw up a $625,000 budget (as 625*1.6=1000). So the overhead definitely matters to the PI---except there is little the PI can do about it after joining a university. Most big universities have similarly high indirect cost rates, which they steadily increase over time.

UC Berkeley (2016): 57%

MIT (2018): 59%

Harvard (2018): 59%

Stanford (2018): 57%

This story, from 2013, gives some of the context and history, as well as averages for universities and other research insitutions (which can have much higher overheads):

http://www.nature.com/news/indirect-costs-keeping-the-lights...

[killjoywashere]

And all that overhead money is going to 3 things: increasing healthcare costs for the burgeoning retiree population of staff, increasing the number of administrators subservient to the king (I mean, provost), and new construction. The political class sees these additional jobs from the last two as the core justificatiin for the government increasing student loans for students and overhead for grants. They don't comprehend the science or frankly give a shit about it. Maybe when they get cancer they'll have a vague sense of interest in their organ system of choice, but that's about it.

[Fomite]

Indirect costs cover things that we aren’t allowed to write into grants. And at my institution at least, it’s questionable as to whether or not that indirect rate actually fully covers the cost of research.