[bradleyjg]

> You cannot just write laws to force Universities to zero out graduate tuition and forfeit all the revenue either, as the Universities would just hike up administrative overhead, cutting a bigger slice from the PI's research grants.

What's wrong with this solution? It looks like it leaves the grantors, universities, PIs, and graduate students in the same financial positions, but use a more straightforward and logical way to get there.

[turkishgetup]

> It looks like it leaves the grantors, universities, PIs, and graduate students in the same financial positions

Because the grantors, universities, PIs, and graduate students are not in the same decision-making positions. PIs and graduate students are absolutely powerless. Grantors may impose rules to give preference to projects from low-overhead institutions, but that's difficult to implement, as the grantors would mostly prefer high impact projects rather than seeking out which school is cheaper. The result would be just higher administrative overhead, and less $ for actual research.

I do realize that many commentators on HN believe that university research is a scam, does not create value, or that graduate students who choose to do a PhD are naively making irresponsible financial decisions, or that grant funding should be reduced in order to weed out the less-capable PIs and RAs/TAs. If I were to take on a perspective from this philosophy, then I would agree that zeroing out graduate tuition is good, as it disincentivizes people from considering a career in academia and imposes a self-limiting mechanism to the academic Ponzi scheme. Personally, I do not believe that defunding academic research is good for society---but restricting university administrative cost would do tremendous good to solve the educational cost problem.

[bradleyjg]

> I do realize that many commentators on HN believe that university research is scam, does not create value, and graduate students who choose to do a PhD are willingly making irresponsible financial decisions

I'm not taking that position at all. Here's how I understand the current situation. A grant proposal would say something like:

  $1,000,000 Lab Equipment and reagents
  $250,000 Post-Docs
  $150,000 PI
  $300,000 Phd students tuition waivers
  ----------
  $1,700,000
  x      1.2 university imposed overhead
  ----------
  $2,040,000

The grantor writes a check for $2,040,000. Of that the university gets $300,000 (for tuition) + $340,000 (overhead) = $640,000. The PI doles out the rest.

If this law were to pass the grant would instead be written up as:

  $1,000,000 Lab Equipment and reagents
  $250,000 Post-Docs
  $150,000 PI
  ----------
  $1,400,000
  x    1.457 university imposed overhead
  ----------
  $2,040,000

The university would get $640,000 and the PI would dole out the rest.

The grantors could decide not to agree to this second grant, while they would to the first, but they have no good reason to do that. From their perspective it's the same thing.

[secabeen]

Close. Many universities don't charge overhead (which is usually 50%+, not 20%) on large equipment purchases. Faculty successfully made the case that it doesn't cost $450k to house a $1 million instrument as compared to $1 million in salaries for researchers.

Also, costs for graduate students do not linearly map to costs for Post-Docs and PIs. This would de-couple the funding for graduate students from the actual enrollment, and would make the computation of the appropriate overhead rate even more complicated and fraught than it already is.

The other important thing to note is that the grantors don't pay the overhead until the actual underlying cost is incurred. Trying to project what it would be would be very hard.

[turkishgetup]

This is an interesting idea. As far as I understand, many grantors such as NSF place strict limit on each categories (PI salary, student stipend, material, travel), and generally you cannot move extra $ from one category to another. I think your proposed method does look like stream-lining the accounting, though I do not have a strong opinion. From the grantors' perspective, they might prefer the first as the second reduces transparency on where $ goes?