A big chunk of that 15,000 are professionals engaged in research activities (mostly funded by grants and other external funds) e.g. the 1600 folks involved in running the Stanford Linear Accelerator, and activities like fundraising and finances. They mostly are NOT folks 'administering' the faculty in any way. So the comparison with your kid's school is not meaningful. Not to say there are perhaps more administrators than might be ideal. But these numbers aren't helpful in understanding whether that's true.
Also, it's worth noting that Stanford is in fact free for folks under the median household income in the U.S. (roughly speaking) which seems pretty 'affordable'.
Of course the economics of one of these large-endowment, research intensive institutions is pretty much unrelated to their teaching function. But that just highlights the weakness of using gross, whole-institution numbers of people/dollars for any sort of comparison. Big universities serve lots of ends (not just teaching undergrads) and so the teasing apart the economic picture (and whether it's efficient at meeting it's many goals) is complicated.
I'm a runner who's fairly familiar with the difference in sensation between activating the soleus and activating the gastrocnemius (thanks PT). I'm also a drummer and I'm pretty sure most of my pedal-work while drumming is gastrocnemius-centric.
Folks submitting Career grants already have nominally full-time time jobs as faculty with corresponding full-time salaries. The jobs are usually termed '9-month' appointments to allow them time in the summer to get paid for research. So the 5 year timeline reflects that this is not most of what they are doing. Certainly if you have CS background and you're mostly interested in making money this is not the career path for you.
The 'Broader Impacts' section the proposal is a required element for all National Science Foundation proposals (like this one). It need not be about diversity but you need to articulate how your proposed work has "potential to benefit society and contribute to the achievement of specific, desired societal outcomes." So certainly it's forced. In the same way demonstrating the Intellectual Merit of your work is also forced (that being the other criteria against which the proposal is going to be judged).
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.
It's an open secret that the indirect costs are budgeted to make profit for a university. That is, the stated costs exceed actual costs. This has been publicly discussed by former federal division heads in major outlets.
The problem with this is the universities rely on this funding to stay afloat, so there's a tail wagging the dog problem. Basically the evaluation of scientific merit then derives from a decision as to whether or not it can procure money from the federal government.
I don't want to argue that grants are bad but I do think the system is broken. Everyone passes the buck to the federal government in this kind of shell game, and then the federal grant system becomes the [near] monopoly over scientific decision making.
The analogy I tend to use in my head is that it's like if your state gave out grants to fund plumbing projects, and people realized that these grants paid more than the actual costs for the project. You have a plumbing project, get the plumber to get a grant for you, and pocket the difference. So people stop hiring plumbers on the basis of the work they do per se, and instead hire them on the basis of their ability to procure state grants. That's kind of what the system works like now.
Do industry grants have larger overhead? It doesn't matter one way or another. That's a different issue. Two wrongs don't make a right either.
> Cost of space, cost of power, cost of IT to provide WiFi and network jacks and bandwidth, cost of water in the water fountain
Time to move to a WeWork? WeWork All Access - $3600/year. Or at home for "free" if no real lab is needed.
> cost of business office staff to process the paychecks
Time to move to Direct Deposit? For a grand total of $0!
> 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
Let them spend it however for free? or hire a CPA for a couple days. No need for $173k worth of CPA time per grant.
> 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.
Based on the math, they either need to invest into automation or it seems like a dying industry.
I think it’s your expectations that are out of whack. There is sticker shock, but pretty much everywhere else is higher.
Also, do you know what a clusterfuck it is if someone screws up accounting, payroll, or legal? Those systems are Byzantine and you really do need an expert to navigate them legally.
Institutions don’t take the risk that an individual might take.
The original paper indicates the starting sample was 3500. On a quick read I didn't quite follow how things were narrowed from there (it's complicated) but it was not just 191 random folks off the street.
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We're a grant-funded office that aspires to improve science education nationally. We've been doing this for 17 years and run a busy website (5+ million visitors/year) that educators across the country use to share expertise around topics like climate change. We're looking for an experienced web developer(JS/PHP/Mysql) who appreciates being part of team that values actual work/life balance and making the world a better place. Being onsite with some regularity is important but some remote work is possible and flexible scheduling (including less than full time work) is open for discussion.
I have a site that includes lots of older content. I checked the first page that came to mind (published in 2005) and it still shows up on the first page of Google results for the obvious search terms. So it certainly isn't as clear-cut as 'everything older than 10 years is not in the index'.
update checked another circa 2003. It's also on the first page of search results for a search on its title.
Also, it's worth noting that Stanford is in fact free for folks under the median household income in the U.S. (roughly speaking) which seems pretty 'affordable'. Of course the economics of one of these large-endowment, research intensive institutions is pretty much unrelated to their teaching function. But that just highlights the weakness of using gross, whole-institution numbers of people/dollars for any sort of comparison. Big universities serve lots of ends (not just teaching undergrads) and so the teasing apart the economic picture (and whether it's efficient at meeting it's many goals) is complicated.