UC Berkeley has reached a new multiyear facilities and administrative rate agreement with the federal government, which will increase the amount of money the campus will receive for research projects.
When the campus conducts sponsored research through grants or agreements, it often incurs indirect costs that are not covered by the grants. The facilities and administrative rate specifies how much of those indirect costs will be paid back by the government.
The rate of recovery for organized research from 2009 to 2011 was 53.5 percent. According to the agreement, dated July 29, the rate increased to 55.5 percent on July 1, and will increase to 56.5 percent in 2013 and to 57 percent in 2015.
Campus Vice Chancellor for Research Graham Fleming said he was pleased with the agreement, as many of the costs of research cannot be reduced. He said the money will be used to recover more of the real cost of research.
“The funds will go into the chancellor’s budget, not for any one thing,” Fleming said. “They will cover many of the costs of doing research that aren’t covered.”
Indirect costs can be incurred from maintenance and operations, library operations and administrative services, among other sources.
Paula Milano, the campus executive director for Space Management and Capital Programs, said in an email that the campus negotiates a new agreement every five years with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the federal agency designated to review and settle UC rates to be applied to sponsored projects.
“The agreement is based on a cost analysis we submitted in July 2011,” Milano said in the email. “Since then, the campus has been responding to a series of questions and requests for additional information from federal staff.”
The campus had gone eleven months without a new agreement since the previous one expired on June 30, 2011. Officials had submitted a proposal for a 62.3 percent indirect cost recovery rate in July 2011.
Fleming echoed Milano’s statement, and said a great deal of information is taken into the cost of indirect research.
“We calculate and provide information for how much space is used for research, our own assessment of the costs, what fractions of buildings are used for research,” Fleming said. “It’s a great deal of effort.”
Steven Beckwith, UC Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, said the agreement represents a substantial amount of progress toward getting money back to the campus that was being spent and not being reimbursed.
Beckwith also said the negotiation process brought national attention to the issue of the rates lagging behind those of private counterparts.
“When the rate systems went into effect, private universities didn’t have other sources (of money) so they negotiated higher rates,” Beckwith said. “Public universities were funded by states, but recently state funding has disappeared.”
Overall, campus officials agree the agreement will be beneficial.
“The campus receives over $100 million per year in F&A reimbursement,” Milano said in the email. “The new rates, which are in most cases higher than the previous rates, mean that F&A recovery from sponsored projects will be closer to the campus’s actual costs for the support of sponsored agreements.”
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Graham Fleming… never ceases to embarrass himself or the UC.
The previous episode – where Fleming tried to defend and retain an employee who gave tens of thousands of dollars in undeserved raises to her administrative subordinate boyfriend – ought to have settled the matter permanently.
FLEMING IS UNFIT FOR ADMINISTRATIVE DUTIES.
Now he prattles on about how taking a larger share grant monies away from research and giving it to the already bloated administration is a good thing… sigh.
DO US ALL A FAVOR: GO KILL YOURSELF GRAHAM.
Actually, facilities and administration costs are IN ADDITION TO research dollars. So, if a researcher gets a million dollar grant, then you would now add 55.5% on top of that, meaning that the researcher gets $1million and the university gets $555K, whereas before the university got only $535K. A change in indirect cost rates doesn’t do anything to a researcher’s dollars.
This is totally false, but reflects a common misconception. The indirect rate is best viewed as a tax on researchers. When I hire a postdoc or pay a student to do research, I have to pay the indirect cost tax. If I get a $500K grant, I have to pay these taxes out of that grant. It’s not like extra money magically appears to pay these costs. This 57% represents a tax on faculty who raise money. (This doesn’t cover benefits. We have to pay those on top.) So hiring a postdoc who gets paid $50K per year + benefits actually ends up costing a faculty member more than $100K per year.
For graduate students doing research with us, we usually also pay full list-price tuition and NRT (for nonresidents). We’re the ones who get hit with the full amount of the tuition increases. (There is no “middle-class access plan” or other generous financial aid coming from central campus to offset these costs. Even if the graduate student comes from a poor family.) Undergrads might not realize this. Administrators certainly seem to think that tuition is magical free money from fairyland or something.
Remember: it is the faculty members on this campus who go out and raise research money by writing proposals, shaking hands, networking, giving talks, forming teams, and coming up with the research ideas. Think of a faculty research group as a small business, except without the profit or potential to get rich. On this campus, we faculty members actually raise more money than is provided by either the state, or by undergrads through their tuition. But although we are both raising the money and the ones who get hit by these tuition and tax increases, there is essentially no voting faculty representation on the Board of Regents. (Meanwhile, the alumni association does have a position and a second position is for a student.)
Campus should see what happens to the amount of money raised by researchers in response to this hike in taxes. Do we raise more? Or less? (What does economic theory predict?) Outsiders don’t realize that most funding agencies have essentially a fixed dollar amount that they’re willing to allocate to a proposal. So higher tuition and higher taxes means that faculty have to work harder at raising money to support the same sized research program. Or we could relax and reduce what we do.