@tylerbickford.bsky.social
I agree it is not straightforward to just fix this with endowments, but this is not quite right. "Distributions" are different than restrictions. At UMich $5.6 billion is unrestricted.
2024.annualreport.umich.edu/uploads/fy24...
2024.annualreport.umich.edu/uploads/fy24...
February 18, 2025 at 6:06 PM
I agree it is not straightforward to just fix this with endowments, but this is not quite right. "Distributions" are different than restrictions. At UMich $5.6 billion is unrestricted.
2024.annualreport.umich.edu/uploads/fy24...
2024.annualreport.umich.edu/uploads/fy24...
![The first form of cost sharing concerns the un-recovery of F&A by institutions of higher education despite them having Federally-negotiated F&A rates. In FY15, the latest year for which data are available [27], U.S. colleges and universities did not recover $4.86 billion in F&A'3 of the $68.7 billion in total funding expended'* (a ratio of 7%), '5 compared to $11.1 billion of F&A recovered. In other words, these institutions did not recover 30% of the F&A they were allowed to receive owing to their negotiated rates. For public institutions, the un-recovery was 34.7% while it was 23.9% for private institutions [27]. At my own university's Norman campus, un-recovered F&A averaged $17.5 million per year from FY11 through FY15, with the ratio of unrecovered to total F&A recovery averaging 48% [6], or well above the national average. Viewed another way, the current Norman campus approved F&A rate is 55%, while the actual recovery rate on funded research awards is 33%. As a result, the university spends 22 cents of its own money to obtain $1 in grant or contract funds. Although actual recovery rates are not systematically compared to approved rates, the general belief in the community is that a 20 percentage point differential is not uncommon |28].](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ceu7npevmnjgvqdknsbi5ow7/bafkreibgsm2ixo7x7ysf2jfz2sg4ofwldfrr3enxo4kmay3ikufzz446pa@jpeg)
