It might be pocket change to Google or J.P. Morgan. In the academic world, those are career making amounts.
And big grants do give financial rewards to the PI. Say I get a $10 million grant; my university will take about $5 million off the top in "overhead" (to be spent on overpaid administrators, student stress counselors, the latino student center, and maybe even education). I turn to them and say "give me a 50% pay raise or I leave". The university then compares the cost of a 50% pay raise to half my grant, and gives me a 75% raise.
As I explained in my post, universities take about half of any grant given to them as "overhead". Sometimes it goes down, but rarely below 25%. The overhead is taken from the grant and put into the general fund of the university.
The general fund of the university is used to pay for things like football coaches, the LGBT.* Formal Ball or rock concerts (note: these are all real examples).
In theory, the overhead only pays for facilities and administrative services necessary to use the grant (e.g., rent and electricity for a lab). In practice, the overhead taken is vastly more than what such services actually cost.
Comments
It might be pocket change to Google or J.P. Morgan. In the academic world, those are career making amounts.
And big grants do give financial rewards to the PI. Say I get a $10 million grant; my university will take about $5 million off the top in "overhead" (to be spent on overpaid administrators, student stress counselors, the latino student center, and maybe even education). I turn to them and say "give me a 50% pay raise or I leave". The university then compares the cost of a 50% pay raise to half my grant, and gives me a 75% raise.
Saying science grant money goes to latino student centers jumps out as odd. Where has this happened?
As I explained in my post, universities take about half of any grant given to them as "overhead". Sometimes it goes down, but rarely below 25%. The overhead is taken from the grant and put into the general fund of the university.
The general fund of the university is used to pay for things like football coaches, the LGBT.* Formal Ball or rock concerts (note: these are all real examples).
In theory, the overhead only pays for facilities and administrative services necessary to use the grant (e.g., rent and electricity for a lab). In practice, the overhead taken is vastly more than what such services actually cost.