The US doesn't want to invest in higher education outright (partially why tuition is high) so they instead attach it to grants. Rule of thumb is everything in the US is 10x more difficult than it should be
Ironically, the EU overheads are so low compared to the costs Universities have to find for research in the UK that they’d probably be bankrupt if everyone had an ERC grant….
I was wondering the same. It's about 20% in Germany. But, most universities here are state funded and receive direct costs for student enrollment numbers. The disparity is quite staggering though.
Probably something to do with the way universities are funded - state vs student fees and investments. Then UK and Ireland fall somewhere in the middle (30% in Ireland)
What do you mean exactly? It just struck me that those high overheads in the US don't seem to translate into making their universities more democratic. Tuition fees are sky high. But OK taxes are a little higher in Europe...
There is no way to know without going directly into how your countries budget, but I suspect it's because there is direct facilities funding in your baseline budgeting. Our "state schools" get very little money from their states and these indirects are their federal funding.
Yes I get that - a greater share of the operating costs of European universities is state funded compared to in US public universities. But I would still find it a little excessive that for a 1 million USD grant 0.5 million would be needed to pay for the heating & cleaning of my lab & admin support.
More than just heating, cleaning and a bit of admin. Costs of buildings, libraries, IT systems etc which functioning research needs. Uk moved to ‘full economic cost’ model in 2005 & we saw big jump in total cost of grants which was due to trying to estimate what contracting a University to run 1/2
a research project in its entirety would be. Of course they only pay 80% of that cost (the other 20% has to be come from cross-subsidy) & virtually all philanthropic & charity funded research gets much less, requiring further cross subsidy. The main source seems to be non-UK student fees which 2/3
are massively higher than non Uk students, and which the current political climate makes a very risky source of funds. One of the main reasons UK Universities are in such a terrible state.
Hi Ben, yes, it's what I thought - more of the shared cost of operating an university are expected to be covered by (variable) revenues from the grants
(side comment: I had to smile when I saw "1/2" then in the 2nd post "2/3" - I do that all the time :-))
It's not just the cost of cleaning and heating the lab plus admin. It's the cost of /building/ the lab plus all shared experimental and computational facilities, plus all support services, plus compliance, administration, etc.
Comments
(side comment: I had to smile when I saw "1/2" then in the 2nd post "2/3" - I do that all the time :-))
I have ZERO idea but it makes me curious to know!