A Look at the Life Span Institute Budget

Letter from the Director

Sept. 12, 2023

Investigators and center directors often ask whether support is available from the LSI Central Office for various types of initiatives. Our ability to provide such support is wholly dependent on the availability of resources, and so I thought it would be a good use of this newsletter to provide some insights as to what resources we have in the central office, and how they are currently utilized.

The LSI currently has a “hard line” budget of about $2.8M. This budget comes to us from the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and is predominantly derived from the Facilities and Administration (F&A) costs (also known as “indirect costs”) that the Office of Research receives from external funding generated by investigators and scholars at KU.

Currently, we allocate $1.72M of that budget (61%) to scientist salaries and $1.0M (37%) to staff salaries; an additional $56k (2%) is in operating and office expenses.  Another way to slice the budget is to look at allocations to LSI’s centers and affiliated programs (64%; this includes both staff and scientist salaries) against the part of LSI’s budget that is devoted to investigator services provided by the Central Office (36%).

It is worth noting that our hard line budget has been progressively cut over the last 10 years. Indeed, if you look at raw dollar amounts, our current budget is approximately at the level of 2002, when LSI’s grant productivity (both direct and indirect costs) totaled $18M (in 2023, LSI’s investigators generated $38M in external funding). The picture looks worse if you look at our budget and our productivity adjusted for inflation (i.e., our budget expressed in terms of 2023 dollars).

The graphs below show our budget (red line) from the last 30 fiscal years.

When we adjusted for inflation (i.e., express our budget in terms of today’s dollars), our current budget is roughly equivalent to our budget all the way back in 1979, when the #1 song was "My Sharona" by the Knack, and the LSI’s (then, the Bureau of Child Research) total grant generation was about $4M. Now, despite the substantial decline in our budget over the last decade, the productivity of LSI’s investigators has actually outpaced inflation over that same time.

The graph below shows that – even when adjusted for inflation – LSI’s generation of both direct costs (blue line) and indirect costs (black line) has increased (by 60% and 71%, respectively), even after correcting for inflation.

All this said, the hard line budget does not show the whole story. In addition to this annual budget, LSI receives a portion of the F&A (indirect costs) that our investigators generate. If the investigator is solely affiliated with LSI, LSI receives 16% of those costs; if the investigator has a split appointment with an academic unit (e.g., the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences), the academic unit receives most of that return (10%) and LSI receives the rest (6%). LSI’s F&A return currently averages about $600k a year (i.e., about $50k per month).

While that might seem to be a substantial return, we have been pressed to use that account to service the growth in grants that we’ve experienced over the several year in expand our preaward and postaward personnel. We currently have 13 total personnel in the Central Office for these positions. Since our hard line budget covers only 5 of these staff positions, we are paying for 8 additional full-time positions out of these returns.

Thus, you can quickly see why we have very little discretionary funding for additional initiatives at this time. LSI’s work is as productive and impactful as it has ever been, and I believe LSI staff provide our investigators with excellent service (we’ll be surveying our investigators on that point in the near future). However, as should be evident from the analyses above, our recent growth has not been met with significant investment, and we have actually been tasked with doing more with less. As a result, in order to maintain our level of services, we have little to no room to fund discretionary initiatives right now.

I anticipate providing more detail about the current funding environment in this venue over the coming months, but I hope this has been helpful to show the current state of the Institute’s finances at this time.

John Colombo, PhD

Professor of Psychology 

Director, Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies