Red alert: pick a college that will not be decimated by the NIH's reduction of indirect costs to 15%

[Anonymous]

Check https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/higher-education-research-development/2022#data

Colleges will be hurt. Those high on the list are going to be decimated. An immediated $100 million budget reduction.

Johns Hopkins, Penn, Michigan, UCLA, Berkeley, Wisconsin, etc.

The public schools are most at risk.

[Anonymous]

Pick undergraduate only liberal arts colleges that don't do research.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Pick undergraduate only liberal arts colleges that don't do research.

Or those without medical schools...

[Anonymous]

What makes you think biomedical research funding changes is going to have much impact on the undergraduate experience at any school? I can see biomedical PhD students and some medical students impacted, but college students?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Check https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/higher-education-research-development/2022#data

Colleges will be hurt. Those high on the list are going to be decimated. An immediated $100 million budget reduction.

Johns Hopkins, Penn, Michigan, UCLA, Berkeley, Wisconsin, etc.

The public schools are most at risk.

what table here is the one to look at?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What makes you think biomedical research funding changes is going to have much impact on the undergraduate experience at any school? I can see biomedical PhD students and some medical students impacted, but college students?

The overhead goes to the universities as a whole. The university relies on it in its budget.

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure how much a med school cuts impacts the undergraduate experience.

In places like JHU with a ton of undergrad research, it will be brutal.

But Duke and Yale with very distinct medical programs and endowments of their own? Not sure.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm not sure how much a med school cuts impacts the undergraduate experience.

In places like JHU with a ton of undergrad research, it will be brutal.

But Duke and Yale with very distinct medical programs and endowments of their own? Not sure.

While I am overall sympathetic to the upcoming plight of Universities, they did it to themselves, by throwing up building after building and staffing with "soft money" researchers wholly dependent on grant money. Biomedical research does cost a lot, but not 55 cents, or in Harvard/JHU's case 75 cents to the dollar. There is very little cross-subsidy from the medical schools of Duke, JHU, UNC, UMich etc to their main campus. Again, all research is not biomedical -- there is a ton of research in other fields. It would be interesting to see if NSF, DARPA, DoE etc. follow suit.

That said, changing the model overnight will destroy the balance sheets of many institutions. It should have been phased in. The ones with gargantuan endowments will weather the storm for a while as they hunt for a better model. That said, this will tip the balance towards utilitarian science, rather than more basic, curiosity driven explorations. And before you go "We're broke", Trump/House Republicans are trying to pass a 5T budget busting package of tax cuts.

[Anonymous]

“That said, changing the model overnight will destroy the balance sheets of many institutions. It should have been phased in.”

They shouldn’t have been overcharging the taxpayers in the first place.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What makes you think biomedical research funding changes is going to have much impact on the undergraduate experience at any school? I can see biomedical PhD students and some medical students impacted, but college students?

The whole school is hurt. Professors often teach as well as do research. With less salary covered they need to cut other places including aid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:“That said, changing the model overnight will destroy the balance sheets of many institutions. It should have been phased in.”

They shouldn’t have been overcharging the taxpayers in the first place.

They were not overcharging -- modern biomedical research costs a lot and there are a lot of invisible costs. On top of it, there are all the regulations that require someone to monitor compliance etc. University indirects are miniscule compared to what Beltway bandits (even a single one) charge. Destroying research will have outsize effects (a single dollar in federal R&D has many multiples of return in GDP - https://mattsclancy.substack.com/p/government-funding-for-r-and-d-and?r=bgp5&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true. Your next Ozempic is not going to come from the US but somewhere else.

And don't quote the lab leak business which has little empirical evidence.

[Anonymous]

You won't escape this at colleges. Trump is directly attacking universities and colleges generally, this is just one part of the plan.

[Anonymous]

“They were not overcharging”

They were milking the grant for excessive overhead.

[Anonymous]

Most small liberal arts colleges won't be hurt as much, if at all.

[Anonymous]

NIH funding is chock full of soft science funding, social and behavioral.

While this new regulation deals with indirect costs, it doesn't take a genius to realize that soft science funding is going to get brutally, systematically and unremorsefully cut by the NIH whenever the new grant rounds start up.

So there is going to be another major blow befalling universities dependent on this income.