[tnecniv]

Universities are the best at creative accounting. PhD students get charged “tuition” but that is normally (hopefully) out of the pocket of their advisor or another fellowship. So your pay is valued at 120k despite you seeing a quarter of that.

I know some grad students that used that fact to their advantage when applying for credit cards but it’s still gross.

[atrettel]

When I got my PhD (at a public university), I almost got charged for the out-of-state part of this fictitious tuition because I did not switch my residency to the state where I got my PhD. The requirements for residency were pretty onerous from what I remember and I would have been unlikely to qualify. Instead, I took my "preliminary exam". Upon passing the exam, my title changed from "PhD student" to "PhD candidate" and it waived the out-of-state tuition for the rest of my PhD. So universities take this stuff seriously but have arcane procedures for edge cases like this that kinda make a mockery of the whole thing. That said, I'm grateful I did not have pay in the end!

[pfannkuchen]

How does treating the tuition as a charge and payment (instead of the tuition being zero) benefit the university?

[moregrist]

It transfers money from grant funds into the University general fund, where it can be used for other purposes, like paying for less lucrative departments and administrative salaries. More or less, this plus the ph.d. student’s stipend is the cost of the student, and both can be charged to a grant that the student is working on.

This is baked into grant funding and has been for at least 40-50 years. No one is doing anything underhanded here; NIH is fully aware of the situation. Some grant organizations, including NSF, are much stingier with their grant overhead (ie: don’t allow it).

Whether or not the overhead is fair is a matter of opinion, I guess. I don’t think it’s even close to the most broken aspect of grant funding, though.

[ftyers]

NSF definitely does, and it's often (at least at R1) of >50%

[kelipso]

Overhead for government contractors are typically 100% or their salary or more for research work, so percentages like that (whether fair or not) are pretty standard.

[j7ake]

It’s more expensive for the prof to hire the student.

At MIT it is easily 100k per year to fund a PhD student. But phd student gets much less than half of that.