[dmurray]

100% seems reasonable for other businesses.

If I had a factory with 100 people assembling my product, or a sales team with 100 people selling it, I'd be quite happy to only budget for the cost of another 100 people to pay my rent and run my IT, payroll, accounting, janitorial services, maintaining my machinery...

I get the impression that modern universities have five or ten other employees for each teacher/researcher, which assuming everyone gets the same pay implies 500-1000% overhead, or subsidy from sources other than grants.

[ok123456]

The problem is that they've created a whole hierarchy of useless deans and other admins to eat up all that overhead to justify it.