Rutgers is respected internationally as a cutting-edge public research university. But the vital, life-saving work our faculty, staff, postdocs, and grad workers do is being put at risk—by our own administration.
This year, the administration set the fringe benefit rate—the money taken from every grant at Rutgers to pay for employee benefits such as health insurance and retirement—on non-federal-government grants at 80.59 percent of salary for faculty and staff working. That’s as much as three times what researchers at other Big Ten and New Jersey schools pay!
New Jersey’s fringe rate has been one of the highest in the country for several years because the state requires Rutgers to pay for faculty and staff pension benefits at the much higher rate set for the Public Employees Retirement System (PERS)—a plan almost no one at Rutgers is even eligible for!
Our unions drew Governor Murphy’s attention to this problem, and over the past several years, he has set aside additional funding for Rutgers and other NJ universities—$75 million in the current year—to offset the burden of the high fringe rate. In his budget recommendation for 2024–25, the governor said the $75 million was meant to help Rutgers and other state public universities be “more competitive for federal, state, and privately funded research grants.”
But the Rutgers administration screwed up this temporary fix won by our unions by setting a 37.61% fringe rate for federal government grants—and a rate more than twice as high on grants from state, private foundations, and other sources, which account for nearly half of all grants at Rutgers.
As our colleagues Derek Sant’Angelo and Lisa Denzin, faculty members at the Child Health Institute of NJ, pointed out in an op-ed article, if a research scientist was hired for a non-federal grant project at Rutgers at a $70,000 a year salary, the total charge to the grant would be $126,413 year because of the high fringe rate. But if the same scientist was hired at the same salary at Princeton, the total charge would be $95,620. Inevitably, our university will lose out on grants because of the inflated fringe charge for faculty and staff, and our world-class reputation will suffer.
The vastly inflated nonfederal fringe rate will have a devastating impact on research (as two top Rutgers officials acknowledged indirectly in a recent email). Those overseeing non-federal grants will have to make an impossible choice: spend less money on the actual work of research—or lay off staff workers and cancel future NTT faculty contracts.
This makes no sense at all!
Rutgers is the only public university we know of that has such vastly different fringe rates for federal and non-federal grants. No other NJ public college or university, which also bears the burden of an inflated fringe rate, comes even close to the rate the Rutgers administration set for non-federal grants.
Our unions will keep working for a permanent fix that brings New Jersey’s inflated rate down for everyone (as we’ve succeeded in doing for postdocs and grad workers). But the administration has to stop undermining our ongoing efforts—and threatening irreparable damage to research at Rutgers! They need to bring the non-federal fringe rate down to the lower rate they set for federal grants.