Tangentially related question: Why do universities like Harvard (who has a ~$60bn endowment) get federal funding at all? Between tuition and donors are they not profitable?
Tangentially related question: Why do universities like Harvard (who has a ~$60bn endowment) get federal funding at all? Between tuition and donors are they not profitable?
Alice is a professor at Harvard. She wants to research some topic. She applies to the NSF for a grant. The NSF says "wow that research sounds awesome and aligned with our priorities" and funds her lab to perform that research. She and the lab perform the research and share it with the scientific community for free.
That's what federal funding for universities looks like.
> She and the lab perform the research and share it with the scientific community for free.
I remember that people advocated quite hard a few years ago to make that last part mandatory, because at the time it wasn't. Universities can claim ownership and patent the discovery. The research was also usually locked behind for-profit publications, thus limiting the research to only those that can afford to pay.
The initiative that I remember asked that government funded research must be published in open access, and that no patents (or other IP) may be created in direct relation to such research.
Did such initiative win and become law?
The journals are often behind paywalls, though more and more research is published open access.
Regardless, researchers share their research with other researchers for free and a huge amount of paywalled papers are actually just available for free on the authors' websites.
It's not funding for student tuitions, rather Harvard research labs bid on research grants just like all universities do. Government sponsored university research since WW2 has been a primary driver of innovation in the US and a key element in the US becoming and maintaining its position as the #1 economy.
It's investment, not charity.
Research grants, laboratories, partnerships. Government funding of universities are usually not handouts but investments.
For example:
| Sarah Fortune, a professor and chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, woke up Tuesday to a stop-work order for a large contract focused on unraveling how the immune system fights tuberculosis, with the goal of creating better detection and vaccines.
How is this related? The issue is government overreach.
Who said they aren't profitable
They are already spending billions a year from the endowment, which is around the maximum that can be spent from it sustainably.