Another day, another email.

“Dear Dr. Heathers, Unfortunately, The People With All The Money (TPWATM) have decided not to move forward with your project proposal. Each proposal is considered relative to other proposal submissions in each area, along with the potential for innovation and outcomes relative to our Great And Glorious Mission. Regretfully, not every good project idea is invited in each cycle… although we let a few bad ones in just to keep you on your toes. LOL! TPWATM appreciate your time, effort and thoughtfulness in preparing and submitting your project idea — I mean, not really, but… well, you know. We wish you success in your future endeavors and efforts to obtain alternative funding for this notable project.”

(I might have edited this a bit. Also, doesn’t the word notable just drip with sarcasm? If it was notable, you’d fund the bloody thing. When will funding agencies learn to send a message entirely confined to: ‘Sorry — you didn’t get the money. Frankly, this process is strenuous and degrading for all of us. All the best.’)

In case you’re not from my world: I asked a funding body for money to do a project, and I didn’t get it.

Obviously I’m disappointed, but in the midst of my rejection, there’s a broader issue on my mind… and it’s the fact that there might not be enough rejection left to have. Let’s look at some funding rates from around the world.

Here’s the NIH in the USA.

Here’s the ESRC in the UK.

Here’s the ERC in Europe.

Here’s the ARC Discovery grants in Australia

(^Note: this one isn’t up-to-date, it fell again this year… it’s 17.7% now.)

In one sense, these changes don’t look like much. Funding rates rise a bit, fall a bit, skitter around, and so on. It’s a modern world, right? More scientists around, less proportional funding available, what do you expect? Right?

The problem is these last few tiny declines. The little tails on the lines that bring us to the present day. Because if you’re applying for these funding mechanisms, success rates falling from 35% to 30% is a minor irritation, but funding rates falling from 20% to 15% — which is about what they’re doing right now — is a goddamn inside-out five-dimensional disaster.

Let me explain.

Failure is inevitable, and part of academic research. Your odds of getting your research published in Fancy Journal are low, your odds of getting the job you want are low, and — most relevantly — your odds of getting your grants awarded funding are low. People who fail to win grant money generally fail to have a job.

A grant is binary, or at least, it almost always is. You get one, or you don’t. You can’t get 35% or 2/3rds of a grant. You can get less money than you ask for, but this is still very much in the ‘yes’ column.

Often researchers keep actively pursuing funding for different projects until they get someone to say yes to one. At which point, they have time to back off and, you know, do some science with all the money. Or, at the very least, shift their focus somewhat.

So, keep all that in mind and let’s assume for convenience that we want to reach better than 50/50 odds of getting awarded a grant.

Obviously, if we have a grant that has a 50% success rate — where half the people who apply are awarded funding —then to get our odds environment we should apply for 1 grant. Trivial.

What about a 40% success rate? Well, then, the failure rate is 60%, and the failure rate for 2 grants is 60%*60% i.e. 36%. So, to get better than 50/50 odds we should apply for 2 grants.

Now. Here’s the horror show.

This graphs includes the cases of “how many grants do I have to write to get a) 50% or more likely or b) 80% or more likely to be funded”. What you’ll notice is present success rates put us right up against that left-hand side hockey stick. It’s the part where small changes in success rate produces large changes in the normative output of applications needed to get success. And these little differences means hundreds of hours of writing and conversation and editing and proposing… and, at this point, almost all of it will be of no consequence whatsoever.

In other words, our little kink in the system here is where it starts to get ugly. It’s where the already over-subscribed mechanisms to award money start to become properly clogged. The inevitable result, if we aren’t already there, is more applications being submitted than can be adequately assessed, lowering the quality of grant submissions AND reviews. A vicious cycle begins, where bad grants are assessed badly.

Some people would tell you it’s getting worse. It might be.

But my estimate for things getting truly jobbed is where major funding mechanisms all over the world have a success rate of about 15%. If present trends continue, we’ll be there soon.

And then we have a really serious problem.

What a fine time to be a young scientist.