The Top American Research Universities - The Center for ...

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Source Notes
The Center Measures
Total Research Expenditures
Federal Research Expenditures
Source: NSF/SRS Survey of R&D Expenditures at
Universities and Colleges, FY 2005.
Each year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) collects
data from hundreds of academic institutions on expenditures for
research and development in science and engineering fields and
classifies them by source of funds (e.g., federal government, state
and local government, industry, etc.). These data are the primary
source of information on academic research and development
(R&D) expenditures in the United States. Included in this survey
are all activities specifically organized to produce research
outcomes that are separately budgeted and accounted for. This
“organized research” may be funded by an external agency or
organization (“sponsored research”) or by a separately budgeted
organizational unit within the institution (“university research”).
This report excludes activities sponsored by external agencies
that involve instruction, training (except training in research
techniques, which is considered organized research), and health
service, community service or extension service projects.
All Federally Funded Research Labs (FFRLs) are excluded
from these academic expenditures data, including the following:
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (California Institute of Technology);
Los Alamos National Lab, Lawrence Livermore Lab, Lawrence
Berkeley Lab (University of California); Software Engineering
Institute (Carnegie Mellon); Argonne National Laboratory (University
of Chicago); National Astronomy and Ionospheric Center
(Cornell); Ames Laboratory (Iowa State University); Lincoln
Laboratory (MIT); Plasma Physics Lab (Princeton); and Linear
Accelerator Center (Stanford). The NSF data no longer classify
the Applied Physics Lab (APL) at Johns Hopkins as an FFRL,
but federal funds support the vast majority of research conducted
there. The APL makes up nearly one-half of Johns Hopkins’
total R&D expenditures and 53 percent of its federal R&D
expenditures.
While inconsistencies in reporting (known and unknown) do
exist here, as in any survey of this type, problems arise mostly
when one breaks out the data by source of funds. NSF expects
institutions to use year-end accounting records to complete this
report, and there are nationally recognized accounting guidelines
for higher education institutions. However, there are also countless
variations in institutional policy that determine whether the
university reports a particular expenditure as coming from one
source or another, or possibly not counted at all. Take federal formula
funds for agriculture (e.g., Hatch-McIntire, Smith-Lever) as
an example. We conducted an informal survey of the appropriate
institutions in the Association of American Universities (AAU)
and found that two out of eleven land grants did not include
any of these federal funds in their 1997 NSF data, while others
included all or some of these monies. Because these funds make
The Center for Measuring University Performance
The Top American Research Universities
up a very small percentage of the total research expenditures in
any given year, the impact on our total research rankings is slight.
The agriculture formula funds will have a somewhat greater, but
still small, impact on the federal research rankings. NSF notes,
“An increasing number of institutions have linkages with industry
and foundations via subcontracts, thus complicating the identification
of funding source. In addition, institutional policy may determine
whether unrestricted state support is reported as state or as
institutional funds.” 1
We believe that the reporting inconsistencies in the data are
relatively minor when using the total research expenditures and
the federal research expenditures component. Federal and state
government audits of institutional accounting make deceptive
practices highly unlikely, even though these entities do not audit
the NSF data directly. NSF goes to great lengths to verify the accuracy
of the data, especially federal expenditure data—checking
them against several other federal agencies that collect the same
or similar information. In fact, all major federal agencies and their
subdivisions submit data to NSF identifying research obligations
to universities each year. Historically, the NSF data have tracked
very closely the data reported by universities. 2 Further, for their
National Patterns of R&D Resources series, NSF prefers to use
the figures reported by the performers of the work (that is, academic
institutions, industry, nonprofits) because they believe that
the performers are in the best position to accurately report these
expenditures.
In some sections of this report, these expenditure data are
deflated to constant 1983 dollars to show real change over time.
While NSF uses the Gross Domestic Price (GDP) implicit price
deflator in its reports on federal trends in research, we use the
Higher Education Price Index (HEPI) because of its narrower
focus. Developed by Research Associates of Washington, the
HEPI illustrates the effect of inflation on college and university
operations. 3 In contrast, the GDP implicit price deflator is based
on change in the entire U.S. economy and, as noted by NSF itself,
“[its] use more accurately reflects an ‘opportunity cost’ criterion
[i.e., the value of R&D in terms of the amount of other goods and
services that could have been spent with the same amount of
money], rather than a measure of cost changes of doing
research.” 4
The research trend data always reflect the most recent published
data available because NSF allows institutions to submit
revised figures for up to two years. Each year, NSF reports data
for the current year as well as for the previous seven years.
Specifically, we use the 2006 Survey data for fiscal years (FYs)
2005-06, the 2005 Survey for FYs 1998-2004 data, and the 2004
Survey for FY 1997 data. NSF’s published nationwide totals for
academic R&D expenditures will not always match the corresponding
totals in this study due to NSF's sampling procedures for
smaller or non-reporting institutions. In some years, rather than
identifying the institutions individually, NSF provides one
aggregate figure for all sampled institutions.