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What a $500k grant proposal looks like

austinhenley.com

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Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#11

Post by the_snooze »

glofish wrote: post #5

also noteworthy elements: university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. Over five years that works out to basically $50K/year That needs to cover 1 month summer salary plus the salary and the tuition for a single student, and the travel to conferences, and the experiment ... and that is a "prestigious" CAREER award only few people get ... no wonder the author jumped ship

At my institute, that's not how overhead is calculated. Overhead is a percentage of what the PI is budgeted for.

So for a $500K grant, 53% overhead really means about 34.6% of $500K. The university's cut is $173K, which is 53% of the PI's budget of $327K.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#12

Post by ordersofmag »

monkeybutton wrote: post #6
tomrod wrote: post #4

> My university took a whooping 53% for overhead. Highway robbery. I love these kinds of breakdowns. It's very useful to help communicate successful models in people's crafts.

I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?

Yes. Cost of space, cost of power, cost of business office staff to process the paychecks, cost of a bunch of CPA and auditors to make sure you're following all the federal regulations about how the money can be spend, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain, etc, etc.... At institutions where a large fraction of the work going on is grant funded if you didn't do it this way you can't really make your institutional budget balance. And 53% is actually pretty low compared to many institutions. Source: I've been 100% grant funded the last 20 years of my career and have been involved in writing 100's of federal research grants.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#14

Post by light_hue_1 »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #7

I am not in academia but the 53% overhead to an outsider is absurd! Probably the same reason tuition has gotten so high, someone has to pay for all those deans, vice deans and vice vice deans!

Compared to industry? That's very low! Universities are cheap.

53% overhead works out to be 34% of the total money.

I've written grants with many industrial partners (companies you would recognize). All have had much higher overhead rates. Normally these rates are kept secret, but here's a fun memo from the Federal Transit Administration talking about 127% overhead rates! https://www.transit.dot.gov/funding/procurement/third-party-...

The DoD gives as an example a rate of 125%!

> For example, in recovering the indirect costs associated with particular contracts during the year, each dollar of engineering direct labor worked on a contract is burdened with an engineering overhead of 125.95 percent.

https://www.dhg.com/portals/0/headers/industries/government-...

This puts universities in some context: https://www.healthra.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Nature_K...

You'll see that non-profits and hospitals tend to have far higher rates. This doesn't include industry though. Which would be far higher.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#15

Post by monkeybutton »

AmazThrowAway wrote: post #9
monkeybutton wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?

They have a shockingly detailed model that they negotiate with the federal government ! https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_...

Wow! Shockingly detailed is not an overstatement.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#16

Post by a_bonobo »

glofish wrote: post #5

also noteworthy elements: university overhead 53%, so that leaves $250K. Over five years that works out to basically $50K/year That needs to cover 1 month summer salary plus the salary and the tuition for a single student, and the travel to conferences, and the experiment ... and that is a "prestigious" CAREER award only few people get ... no wonder the author jumped ship

It's quite similar to the Australian system. The most prestigious, hard -to-get award with ~10% success rate, which took me two months to write last time (I was rejected) awards on average AUSD 400k over 3 years. That's a Discovery Project from the Australian Research Council.

A postdoc with overheads (postdocs make decent salary of around 100k + overheads similar to OP) budgets at about 150k per year. So with the most prestigious, biggest award the non-human researchers can get, you can barely fund one guy for 3 years. There is an ongoing exodus because this is insanity.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#17

Post by sndean »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #7

I am not in academia but the 53% overhead to an outsider is absurd! Probably the same reason tuition has gotten so high, someone has to pay for all those deans, vice deans and vice vice deans!

I've heard Harvard's is/was 96%? Or at least that was for a NIH R01-seeking person there in ~biochemistry in 2015. Where I'm at it's probably around 100% but I really don't want to know. We're all expensive.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#18

Post by dwohnitmok »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #7

I am not in academia but the 53% overhead to an outsider is absurd! Probably the same reason tuition has gotten so high, someone has to pay for all those deans, vice deans and vice vice deans!

That overhead honestly doesn't seem that high to me. If I think about private companies with low need for physical equipment (e.g. software companies) I suspect the overhead would be comparable if not greater. Usually I hear ~100% as an average figure (keeping in mind that overhead is defined as a percentage of non-overhead costs so 100% means half of your money spent is on overhead).

But I'm not that confident. Would love to hear from business owners.

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#19

Post by wanderer_ »

AmazThrowAway wrote: post #9
monkeybutton wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how the university gets to the 53% overhead figure. Do they have a fully costed internal accounting of things like "rent" for lab space and share of administrators' time/salary?

They have a shockingly detailed model that they negotiate with the federal government ! https://cfo.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/facilities_and_...

It seems theirs is even higher (57%).

Re: What a $500k grant proposal looks like

#20

Post by xwdv »

Nothing in this proposal should take 5 years. For $250k you can easily do this research in a single focused year probably.

I imagine researchers must actually be doing multiple grants in parallel or have other main jobs to earn decent money because if they only do this one thing at a time I have no idea why someone would choose this life of poverty when they could be making solid six figures building practical things.

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