Transparency Crisis: A Black Box of Overhead Spending & Academia’s Mission Creep from Rigorous Science

American universities are falling short of their mission to push the limits of scientific discovery and prepare students for the workforce, often while raking in hundreds of millions of dollars a year in federal research and development grants.

Numerous reports have described a crisis in research reproducibility.

At the same time, recent grads are struggling to gain a foothold in the American economy. A recent report by ed tech company Cengage found a wide “gulf on workplace skills and priorities.” According to the report, employers believe graduates should be equipped with “practical competencies” while educators emphasized soft skills like “critical thinking” and “problem solving.” Such gaps compound issues grads are facing in a constrained economy with fewer employment opportunities.

Despite these concerns, federal funding to universities or scientific research has trended ever upwards since records began in 1963. In FY 2023 funding reached close to $50 billion.

But all of that funding hasn’t just gone to scientific inquiry. American universities have been enjoying overhead spending bonuses worth 50-60% of their research grants for decades. That means that for every dollar in research spending, an additional 50-60 cents is given to the university for overhead.

Overhead funds are meant to go toward university and department infrastructure, but recent reports have suggested exorbitant overhead spending feeds into bloated university administrations that distract from academic inquiry.

But overhead spending is not contributing to waste alone. Grant-making rules, in some cases mandated by Congress, have added additional requirements to scientific endeavors, called “broader impacts,” which cut into direct spending as well. On top of conducting research, scientists often must state in grant applications how they will participate in public relations services like designing museum exhibits, conducting middle school lab demonstrations, or developing podcasts, in the name of having a “broader impact” beyond scientific discovery.

These requirements not only divert funds and attention away from research; they give universities incentives to build out even more administration to facilitate outreach activities. Explicit inclusion requirements, like targeting women or “underserved minorities” for such federally funded programmatic activities, also further embed the DEI ideology within the campus climate.

Open the Books examined such requirements from the National Science Foundation (NSF). NSF spent $7.4 billion in research and development grants in FY 2024, leaving it in the middle of major agency R&D grantors. NSF projects span a wide variety of scientific fields, from computer science to geology and more.

This report examines research and overhead funds granted to five universities over ten years, along with the growth of administration and, in particular, DEI-related positions. The impact of broader impact requirements embedded in grant proposals is also explored.

The results will demonstrate that universities are undermining their former commitments to true scientific endeavor in research, in favor of building ever more new administrative functions and special projects.

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NOTES

1
“‘An Existential Crisis’ for Science,” Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, 28 Feb 2024.

2
”Reproducibility in Cancer Biology: Challenges for assessing replicability in preclinical cancer biology,” Cancer Biology, 7 Dec 2021.

3
”Is there a reproducibility crisis in science?” Charlotte Stoddart, Nature, 25 May 2016.