[thaumasiotes]

I had the impression that even at very prestigious schools lab funding is mostly from grants.

I'd be interested to see how much of, say, the UNC Chapel Hill chemistry department's research expenditures come out of grants. Do you know how I'd find the information?

Two other points:

> Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants.

In what sense is the first case, a business sponsoring the lab, not "grants"?

> It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.

But the original claim was that the cost of employing researchers is lower for an academic lab than it would be for a new lab. ("other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.") That has nothing to do with the availability of funding or cross-subsidies! Is it true or not?

[_delirium]

Grants are definitely also important in academia, but at least the base salary of professors and some of the grad students ends up being covered by the university out of separate revenue sources (mostly tuition, but sometimes state funding or endowment), which makes it a bit easier. It also means that if you go a few years between grants you still get paid, and you can still get your grad students paid by having them be TAs for classes (instead of RAs on your grants). I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.

There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants! They have no teaching responsibilities, since the university isn't directly paying them anything. But imo this is a much more stressful arrangement since you don't have the regular university salary to fall back on. Some researchers at small companies are essentially like that, having to bring in a stream of SBIRs to keep themselves paid.

I don't think researchers' base employment necessarily has to go through universities, it's just ended up as the most common mechanism for researchers to get a stable salary. The Institute for Advanced Study [1] is an alternate model, funding researchers' salaries out of its nearly $1 billion endowment and a stream of donations and institution-level grants, without being attached to a university. Kind of like a "think tank", but for science. But institutions along that model currently (at least in the U.S.) employ a tiny number of researchers compared to either universities or industrial research labs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study

[thaumasiotes]

> I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.

Well, I picked UNC Chapel Hill as the example mostly because it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?

I'm perfectly happy to do the calculation in terms of "the chemistry department spend $X this year, and received $Y in grants, so their funding comes out of grants in a Y/X proportion".

> There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants!

I was aware of this (well, not that there was a title difference), but there is something I've been wondering about.

When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? It obviously doesn't constitute corruption or embezzlement to help yourself to some of the grant money -- that's what a salary is. How much of it can you take?

[_delirium]

> it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?

Public university budgets should generally be public information, but tbh I don't have any idea where I'd start looking for granular data, especially in an easy to process format.

> When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? ... How much of it can you take?

Yeah, pay is itemized on grants. Despite being expected to bring in your own salary, there is still some kind of official pay grade you're at. How that's set when you're hired I don't have great insight into (I imagine it varies a lot). But after the initial hire generally pay raises work the same as with any other faculty (annual cost of living or merit increases, occasional promotions between ranks, etc.). The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits. People on soft money positions sometimes piece together support from multiple grants. So you might write a grant as PI asking for 75% support over 3 years, then on a different grant your colleague is writing, they ask for money to cover 25% of your time as co-PI over 3 years. Larger institutions might also have some internal money available to smooth over shortfalls. Also, some agencies have a salary cap (e.g. NIH's is $200k).

[thaumasiotes]

> The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits.

This seems like it would tend to promote collusion between researchers and universities, where whenever somebody is hired into a soft money position, they would prefer to have a high official salary, and the university doesn't care because the actual salary is $0. The granting agencies aren't a party to salary negotiations -- what's keeping salaries down? Say someone's job is to get grants from NIH. Why would they ever be salaried below $200k?

[Frost1x]

Your assessment is dead on. This is becoming more common in research related positions. For many years, I've "paid" almost the entirety of my salary in similar roles, I essentially pay a toll to an institution for its name, prestige, and connections as well as networking opportunities to support my continued employment.

The reason you don't set starting salaries too high is that for the business managing this (be it a university, private lab, etc.), although they essentially hire someone who makes money for them and pays their salaries through overhead costs that almost always exist (indirect costs), if you set the salary too high the role won't be able to reliably maintain itself, and therefor the indirect percentage you draw from incoming grants from that role becomes less stable. You could set a research associate for a fresh post doc at say $500k, but they'll probably never be able to pay themselves and therefor you because they won't be able to secure that. So you'll constantly be hiring for that position so it has to drop down to an amount that can be reliably filled and reliably bring in money.

From the institution's perspective, they want to get your comp rate as high as they possibly can to maintain their salaries but not to a point where it self sabotages their own position. The way these institutions maintain their administrative positions is to find these sweet spots and then diversify risk by hiring more and more researchers to pull in money for themselves and their own salaries. If several fail to pull in grants, admin is cushioned by the total number of grants (likely enough pulled in grants to provide enough indirect for admin). Take the additional pool and reinvest it in research so you get researchers to do even more free work for you. Some research orgs I've seen have incredibly high turn over rates (on the order of 1-2 years) and their model seems to be as long as they can keep a fresh batch of unsuspecting individuals in at high enough rates they can draw grants and indirect from to pay their salaries, it doesn't matter if that individual hired becomes resource pressured and burns out, there's a line of other qualified people more than happy to step in and naively fall into the same game. Rinse repeat.

Eventually it can tarnish the reputation of the organization itself where external money pools stop looking at the person receiving the grant but more at the organization of the person receiving the grant where they begin to lose faith that the organization can follow through on its employees promises. There seems to be enough turnover from funding agencies and the research orgs that do this themselves that institutional memory is short enough to keep the whole game going on. It's getting to a point at some organizations where people who pull in grants are joining the same gig as the research org and the idea is to act as a figurehead to the project where they then convince naive other lower level research positions to do most the legwork and pay themselves a portion of the total grant acting as another layer of administration. You'll see such grant recipients often as the recipient or lead on multiple grants they couldn't possibly be working on all of simultaneously. They play similar risk games to the research orgs that employ them in that if those they hire can't follow through, they may lose their own role.

It's quite a gig in some places, a bit of a pyramid scheme, really. This is why I've lost so much faith in research publications anymore, because the underbelly is pretty ugly. I've seen this at universities, private labs, even national labs and "think tanks." We really need to reevaluate and restructure how research is performed in the US.