There was an interesting article in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle about UC’s losses to indirect costs. Glossed over in the article is the importance of research to the reputation of UC’s faculty and thus the institution itself, or the important role this research plays in graduate education. Still, this is an issue we hear a lot about lately as part of the Commission of the Future recommendations. Here is an excerpt from the article:
“UC wins about $3.5 billion per year in research grants, of which $780 million is for indirect costs. It’s not nearly enough, Croughan reported. Research support actually costs $1.5 billion per year, or $720 million more than UC recovers. ”We’re losing about 20 cents on the dollar,” Croughan told the commission. ”Harvard complains about losing 5 cents on the dollar. I would argue we’ve not been aggressive enough.” No university can hope to recover all of those indirect costs. In fact, some grant providers refuse to reimburse at all, Croughan said. But most big research universities are better than UC at negotiating reimbursement rates. ”I was pretty astonished at how low our rates were,” said UC Executive Vice President Nathan Brostrom, a commission member.”
And here is a link to the full article:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/16/MNOC1DTI1V.DTL