Ah yes, of course the massively inflated admin salaries aren’t on the chopping block at all, gotta gut the school instead.
one admin my partner and i have been immensely critical of is making $800k/yr. meanwhile he’s ballooned tuition to “restore the endowment”, increased undergrad enrollment, and cut funding to graduate students
Did you reply to the wrong article by accident? Because this one is about grant money for research.
No, right article. Grants, tuition, etc., all of it is used as justification for those inflated salaries.
Do people actually think that inflated salaries have absolutely nothing to do with the overall funding going through the University, including those grants?
To be a little more specific, schools take a cut (often called overhead) of awarded grant money to pay admin salaries among other things - sometimes in excess of 50%!
These rates have grown universally over time and the practice is obvs not popular amongst the actual researchers/PIs.
It’s called indirect costs to use appropriate terms. These are part of awarded grant money but not part of the actual proposed research budget. These costs exist because there are utilities, office supplies, yes admin, etc that are needed to actually perform research that are 1) hard/impossible/impractical to quantify on a per grant basis and 2) specifically disallowed from being paid via the research budget.
The practice is fine in principle. Rates have gone up because inflation has gone up more than the budgets have. Also how universities allocate that part of their budget should also be changed. Rates should be walked back but that needs to be concurrent with budget increases.
Note that except for part of the PIs salary all salaries, benefits, equipment, reagents, etc are paid from the research budget.
