Squeezing budgets; funding UK research

[mtbc]

I work at the University of Dundee and today went along to Principal's Question Time. Perhaps due to the UK's austerity program there have been increasing pressures on funding. The latest would be a 2% rise in both pension and National Insurance^* contributions and the teaching and research grant to be cut by 3.9%.

A principal component of the University of Dundee's solution to their issues arise from observing similar universities plotted as points against axes of research income and teaching income. Apparently, the University of Dundee has a very high research:teaching ratio, even higher than that of Queen's University Belfast and the University of Aberdeen and, causal mechanism undisclosed, those institutions with a more typical ratio enjoy more financial sustainability.

What I've yet to have explained to me is why. Is there something about proposing research budgets to UK or EU sources that prohibits claiming enough indirects/overhead to cover the proposed project's true cost? Why on Earth would relatively more research than typical be a problem?

^*National insurance is like social security. Both the employer and employee contribute which is part of why I expect lower net pay. I now also expect a tighter household budget in the longer term because the council tax freeze looks to be ending and there will be some catching up to do there.

Comments

[emperor]

Most institutions are unable to bring in enough funding to cover the true costs of research (89p of funding per £1 of research is not unusual), because funding bodies won't pay the full costs. This is stupid, but that's the way it is.

For most institutions, undergraduates make them money (Cambridge doesn't because the college system is so expensive, but that's quite unusual). Foreign students pay higher fees, so are even more profitable.

[mtbc]

Yes, my impression is that Dundee are especially after foreign students as being somehow unregulated, which may mean that their numbers are less limited; apparently they've been having some success.

Thank you! This certainly explains much of what I have heard, it is just strange that I have found it so hard to actually confirm, you are the first to actually say something clear about it to me. Would you happen to know of any articles or suchlike about this research cost shortfall issue? I can imagine that universities would want to lobby about this, though perhaps not in these austere times.

It seems like another encouragement for good researchers to go elsewhere. Even as a private company bidding for R&D grants, in the US our costs were wholly covered by the Federal government.

[aldabra]

I imagine research grants are unpredictable as a source of funding, whereas teaching is more of a fixed cost. You're bidding against other institutions, and the Research Councils are taking cost into account when deciding what to fund, so there's pressure on everyone to underbid. That's how it works in my (non-University) field, anyway. If you start putting in bids asking for 10% more than the going rate for the research you won't win any of them. You go for the money you can get and then overwork staff and cut corners.

We were badly squeezed after the financial crash by Capita, who started bidding for public research contracts at £1 each and doing the work for free, in order to keep their staff employed and put everyone else out of business.