UC and Extramural Funding
by Anonymous
One valuable point made by the recent UCOF report is that extramurally-funded research is not a net source of revenue to UC, unlike what many people seem to believe. The report also made several good recommendations for reducing the cost of extramurally-funded research to UC, such as working to increase ICR rates. While these are certainly very helpful activities, they are not a complete solution because extramurally funded research can never reach, on average, a cost-neutral basis. The reason for this is that the demand by research universities for extramural funding will always exceed the supply, thus driving down success rates. The UCOF report did not consider the cost to UC of efforts spent on preparing proposals that were never funded.
Success rates for proposals to federal science agencies are rarely above 35% and in many fields are trending down to 10%. A large amount of time of UC faculty and supporting financial staff is thus wasted in the preparation of worthy proposals that will never be funded. Moreover, as success rates diminish, more and more effort is required to produce a competitive proposal, and more and more proposals are submitted in hope that one will be funded.
An additional cost is the waste of effort by university faculty who review proposals as a service to federal agencies. For example, a recent editorial complained about how fourteen reviewers spent several days plus air travel and a hotel stay to review proposals for a program that made only one $150K/yr award (3.6% success rate). Note that federal agencies never reimburse indirect or direct costs spent preparing unsuccessful proposals. Aside from the occasional nominal honorarium, they also never reimburse time spent on reviewing proposals.
This dismal situation drives continual advocacy to increase the federal science budget. While increased funding temporarily alleviates the crisis, it is not a long term solution. The reason is that research universities respond to larger science budgets by developing even larger research programs. This does not even require growth of ladder-rank faculty -- universities simply erect buildings in hope that the infrastructure cost will be paid off by the ICR generated by the newly-hired soft-money researchers housed within them. This strategy might work if only one university pursued it, but it certainly doesn't work if a hundred universities pursue it. The end result is a Malthusian situation where proposal success rates are too low to sustain researcher salaries and building costs.
Just as student fee increases can never make up for reductions in state funding, neither can growth in externally funded research. Extramural funding leverages but does not replace internal funding. Research is an essential component of the UC enterprise, and UC ought to spend core funds on it, but we should become more strategic about how that is done. In particular, we need to drop the apparent goal of UC to indiscriminately maximize gross extramural revenue. Let's work on developing a better system for allocating UC research funds.
One valuable point made by the recent UCOF report is that extramurally-funded research is not a net source of revenue to UC, unlike what many people seem to believe. The report also made several good recommendations for reducing the cost of extramurally-funded research to UC, such as working to increase ICR rates. While these are certainly very helpful activities, they are not a complete solution because extramurally funded research can never reach, on average, a cost-neutral basis. The reason for this is that the demand by research universities for extramural funding will always exceed the supply, thus driving down success rates. The UCOF report did not consider the cost to UC of efforts spent on preparing proposals that were never funded.
Success rates for proposals to federal science agencies are rarely above 35% and in many fields are trending down to 10%. A large amount of time of UC faculty and supporting financial staff is thus wasted in the preparation of worthy proposals that will never be funded. Moreover, as success rates diminish, more and more effort is required to produce a competitive proposal, and more and more proposals are submitted in hope that one will be funded.
An additional cost is the waste of effort by university faculty who review proposals as a service to federal agencies. For example, a recent editorial complained about how fourteen reviewers spent several days plus air travel and a hotel stay to review proposals for a program that made only one $150K/yr award (3.6% success rate). Note that federal agencies never reimburse indirect or direct costs spent preparing unsuccessful proposals. Aside from the occasional nominal honorarium, they also never reimburse time spent on reviewing proposals.
This dismal situation drives continual advocacy to increase the federal science budget. While increased funding temporarily alleviates the crisis, it is not a long term solution. The reason is that research universities respond to larger science budgets by developing even larger research programs. This does not even require growth of ladder-rank faculty -- universities simply erect buildings in hope that the infrastructure cost will be paid off by the ICR generated by the newly-hired soft-money researchers housed within them. This strategy might work if only one university pursued it, but it certainly doesn't work if a hundred universities pursue it. The end result is a Malthusian situation where proposal success rates are too low to sustain researcher salaries and building costs.
Just as student fee increases can never make up for reductions in state funding, neither can growth in externally funded research. Extramural funding leverages but does not replace internal funding. Research is an essential component of the UC enterprise, and UC ought to spend core funds on it, but we should become more strategic about how that is done. In particular, we need to drop the apparent goal of UC to indiscriminately maximize gross extramural revenue. Let's work on developing a better system for allocating UC research funds.
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