Where does the money come from?

30.000 students, 8.000 staff members and 6000 scientific publications per year. No matter how motivated students and researchers are, keeping a such a large university tunning requires a lot of money. Of course, you pay your tuition fee every year, but that’s not nearly enough to finance all the research and education at our university. Therefore, the UG gets money from three additional sources.

Three funding sources

1. Direct government funding
The first funding flow consists of the direct government funding. The university receives this money from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science as a foundation for all its education and research. The government contribution is paid out at once by the ministry and can be spent according to the UG’s own insight.

The contribution is split up in a part for education and a part for research. The amount of money that universities get partly depends on matters like the number of registered students, the number of obtained diplomas, and the number of promotions. To give universities more certainty, they also get a fixed amount of money, no matter how many students or diplomas they have.

The last couple of years, this contribution didn’t grow at the same pace as the number of students. The VSNU, the branch organization for Dutch universities, has calculated how much money is available per student. This was almost €20.000 in 2000, whereas it has now shrunk to €15.000. Investing the money that abolishing the student loans has made available helps mitigate this lack in funding a bit.

2. Governmental research grants
Besides a direct contribution from the government, researchers can get additional money for research from the second funding flow in the form of research grants.. These grants are primarily handed out by two organisations: NWO and the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences. The grants from both organizations are attached to specific research fields or topics. Researchers therefore don’t have complete freedom in choosing a topic, but they can look for a grant within their field of expertise and find a topic within that field.

Researchers don’t just get the money: they have to hand in a research proposal, on the basis of which the organizations decide which proposals are the best and will be funded. These grants mainly end up directly at the researcher or the research group who handed in the proposal. Usually, this money isn’t enough to cover all the costs of the project. The university must then contribute the remainder out of its own pocket: a practice called matching.

3. All other income
The third money flow concerns all other incomes of the university. This includes contract education, shareholdings in companies like Progress and donations to the Ubbo Emmius Fund.

However, grants from the Horizon 2020 programme by the European Committee and research contracted by industrial players. This type of research is often focused on practical, feasible applications and not on fundamental research, which might not yield direct outcomes.

Keeping funding balanced

By the lacking growth of the direct government funding, along with the rising student numbers, research grants and contracted research are becoming more and more important sources of income for the university. We are not unique for that aspect: the increase of externally funded research can be seen worldwide.

We think that the UG should keep reserving enough money for fundamental research, despite of this trend. The primary goal of scientific education and research should be an increase in our theoretical knowledge, not so much the practical utilization. Last spring, our previous faction member Nina de Winter already wrote an opinion piece on this.

However, this doesn’t mean that we should set that third funding flow aside: especially the faculties of Science and Engineering and Medical Sciences can fund researches from this flow, which do provide us with new insights that can help us, and more fundamental research, move forward. So for us, a good balance between fundamental and demand-driven research has the main priority.