[kkylin]

Not disagreeing with your larger point, but a nitpick: at these levels (postdocs, research scientists) the relevant university positions will be funded by grants, in fact largely from the NIH. University budgeting doesn't have all that much to do with it.

Now, postdoc salaries are set by a combination of university policy + whatever the grant budget says, but grant proposals are also assessed based on how much they ask, and postdoc salaries will be set by whatever NIH actually awards the PI. In the end, for NIH to pay their early career scientists more without creating problems for itself (by competing with groups it funds), it will likely have to increase postdoc pay across the board. This will likely add some upward pressure to postdoc pay across fields, since many universities do look at entry-level NIH postdoc pay as a reference.

[data_acquired]

Fair point about how the funding actually works. The UC strike did allow for a good increase to the post-doctoral stipend, and the institutes likely had to move money around in order to make the increases possible.

What's also interesting to me in the concerns raised in the article about how budgets (either from grants or universities) will cover pay increases is that this concern never comes up when research consumable costs increase. I had a friend at a major embedded systems supplier for researchers who spoke of the 90% mark-up they charged labs. This gets into a messy issue of course about pricing power and monopoly in scientific supplies, but its telling that as much of a concern is not raised in the public domain about these sorts of cost increases?