[robwwilliams]

Wow—you and I live in different university universes. The overheads are essential to running research universities. They are definitely not kickbacks. This is obvious when comparing research costs at national laboratories versus research costs for comparable work at most universities.

[queuebert]

Overhead rates at pure research non-profits are much lower than at universities. The difference is the amount of bureaucracy.

[Fomite]

This is not universally true. The last grant I had with a pure research non-profit, my state university had a markedly lower overhead rate, as well as far more flexibility in lowering it (if a sponsor pre-specifies a lower rate, we almost always accept that).

[kelipso]

No, overheads for research organisations, non-profit or otherwise, are typically higher than universities. Researchers cost way more than grad students and researchers have similar percentages of overhead too.

[queuebert]

Five researchers and one admin is cheaper than two researchers, two postdocs, a grad student, two admins, a compliance officer, an HR office, a grants office, a budget office, a legal office, some Deans, Vice Deans, Vice Chairs, Vice Chancellors, etc. You get my point.

I'm sure there are particular examples of places with high overheads, even higher than the 70% at top universities, especially in the biosciences, but historically pure soft money places have been relatively cheap to operate.

[kelipso]

A small independent group might have low overhead but from what I see in the ML research space those types of groups are very limited in what they can do. These small groups also tend to work as subcontractors for large groups anyway, so the overhead advantage becomes somewhat moot. Just submitting research proposals to funding organizations regularly in order to get consistent funding requires a large group, especially these days with lower funding per project. Basically, five researchers and an admin won't survive very long without latching onto bigger groups. Also it's pretty well known that universities are cheaper than contractors by a wide margin.

[robwwilliams]

Not true at all in USA. Check out overheads at Salk Institute or other high profile non-profits.

[TeMPOraL]

Would they still be if they cut down on building sports facilities?

[ModernMech]

They often bring in a lot of money and attract students. Sports facilities are one of the main questions on tours. It's an arms race really, because you can't entice many students to join the school with your course syllabuses and the number of books in the library. So schools invest in other shiny things to catch students' attensions.