Sometimes everything is paid for by the research group, including salaries, and utilities and facilities management is also charged back to the group by the university. The way those funds are allocated varies by institution and some are stingy as fuck, running “like a business.”
They usually don’t know about institutional indirect costs and how they often run around 50% of the research funding in the US.
For those not in the know, that’s an extra 50% that you need to add to the funds you apply for that will just go to the college to use for whatever they want. Research groups often don’t see any of this invested back into their facilities and grad students often need to apply for their own external funding to make a high enough wage just to scrape by.
I’m curious about the scalability of this method, but it’s a bit outside my experience. Seems like it would take a lot of energy to implement?