My son has so far been invited to tour and meet the research team at 3 schools he applied to. Two of the schools offered to pay the full trip expense, one offered a dollar amount of reimbursement that will probably cover a little less than half the cost. He is very interested in all 3 schools. Would it be out of line to ask for the school to offer more assistance with the trip cost?
He can politely ask, for sure. (Congrats on 3 visits! So far my kid is at one visit and one other phone interview).
You can try to ask, but I am guessing that the schools may not have more funds. It’s hard to understand how that could be, because universities seem to have a lot of money. The money is in different wells that other programs can’t reach into. There’s a well for buildings, there are a bunch for scholarships through donations, there are different ones for getting AV equipment, etc.
The research programs are funded usually from grants that the head researcher has had to work very hard to get. The school then takes a huge percentage off of the top so that the researcher can house the lab at the school, sometimes as much as 70%. The grants include zero funds to fly people in, usually. They would include only funds for research. If any funds are offered, that’s amazing. Because that means the school has scraped around to find some money for that. Money for such things would come from, maybe, an alumni donation, for example, and they may have it one year and not the next.
Grants are lean. Every penny must be accounted for to the granter through reporting. A researcher would have X dollars budgeted for a person in his or her lab to work as a grad student, and no more.
You can try but it’s helpful to understand that the university doesn’t usually just hand the research money to fly people in. It’s not that simple.
I’ve known researchers who have applied for grants as many as 14 times to get one grant. They are extremely competitive, like 3% to 6% granting rate, and the grants are very hard to write. Very. Hard. To. Write.
Thank you both for your thoughts on this. Thank you for a perspective I would not have thought of Dustyfeathers.
Well…kind of. Grants often do have discretionary funds that aren’t initially budgeted in. You ask for a little more than you need so you can account for unexpected expenses and such. Or sometimes things cost less than you anticipated and you have money left over. I’ve been on grants where the PI was racing to spend down the extra money before the fiscal year was over because they had too much. A PI may use grant funding to purchase extra equipment he didn’t budget for, like a computer for a new grad student who can’t afford one. I’ve seen this happen.
Often monies for things like student travel come from funds from the Graduate School, or maybe funds the department has specifically set up to do this. There are non-research grants, too - for example, they can write a grant for an educational program designed to attract members of underrepresented groups to the department, and part of that may be designated to fly students in. There are also research center grants, which are very large grants used to run research centers and institutes, and sometimes they specifically set aside money for recruitment of grad students and postdocs.
The NIH granting rate is around 16% now. At NSF, it’s around 23%.