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

The Top American Research Universities
report both. We selected the test which has the greatest percentage
of students reporting. To convert ACT scores scores, we use a
conversion table provided by The College Board to generate a
comparable SAT equivalent score. When an institution submits
neither an SAT nor ACT score, we substitute data from other national
data sources.
Other Measures of Undergraduate Quality
National Merit and Achievement Scholars
Source: The 2006-07 National Merit Scholarship Corporation
Annual Report, which reflects the 2007 freshman class.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation (NMSC) is an
independent, nonprofit organization that awards scholarships to
the nation’s outstanding high school seniors based on their academic
achievement, qualifying test scores, high school principal
and counselor recommendations, and their activities, interests,
and goals. The NMSC names approximately 16,000 National
Merit Finalists each February. Of these, about one-half will
receive a National Merit $2,500 Scholarship, a corporatesponsored
scholarship, or a college-sponsored scholarship.
National Achievement Scholars are selected and funded in a
similar fashion and represent the nation’s outstanding African-
American students. Ideally, the National Hispanic Scholars Program
should also be included in this category, but it does not track
the enrollment of its scholarship winners. Should it do so in the
future, we will include these students in The Center’s data. In this
study, Merit and Achievement scholarships are credited to the
main campus if the NMSC Annual Report does not indicate a
branch campus.
While the number of National Merit and National Achievement
award winners in the entering class provides an indication of the
attractiveness of a university’s undergraduate program to outstanding
students, it is also an indicator that is sensitive to institutional
policies on financial aid. Because the number of Merit
Scholars is small, relatively small changes in institutional aid
policies can have a significant impact on the number of National
Merit Scholars enrolling in institutions. The average SAT score
provides a broader-based and more reliable measure of overall
undergraduate quality; for those reasons, we prefer the SAT scores
to the number of National Merit and Achievement Scholars as an
indicator of undergraduate quality.
Institutional Characteristics
Medical Schools
Source: NCES IPEDS Completions Survey, MD degrees awarded
between July 1, 2006, and June 30, 2007.
Although the IPEDS Institutional Characteristics Survey does
have a “medical” field that indicates whether an institution grants
a medical degree, we choose not to use its data because it includes
medical degrees in Veterinary Medicine, Dentistry, and other professional
health-related fields. For our measure, we determined
whether a particular campus awarded any MD degrees during the
academic year. If the institution did not submit any data to IPEDS
for that year, we then looked at whether it was accredited by the
American Medical Association to determine whether the institution
has a medical school.
Land Grant Institutions
Source: National Association of State Universities and Land Grant
Colleges.
The first Morrill Act in 1862 appropriated federal funds for
universities to provide agricultural and technical education to their
citizens. A second Morrill Act in 1890 expanded eligibility to
include several historically black colleges and universities, and
in 1994 several Native American tribal colleges were recognized
as land grant institutions. Today, there is at least one land grant
institution in each state and U.S. territory and in the District of
Columbia. Of the 105 institutions, most are public universities.
Federal land grant institutions receive both federal and state
dollars in support of their agricultural and extension activities.
While land grant status technically applies to some university
systems, such as the University of California and the University
of Nebraska, for our study we designate as land grant institutions
only those schools that actually perform that function (e.g., UC-
Berkeley, UC-Davis, UC-Riverside, Nebraska-Lincoln). In these
cases, the land grant field will identify whether an institution is
part of a system-wide land grant and whether the vast majority
of the activity occurs on that campus. For example, UC-Davis is
coded as “Yes-System” while UCLA is coded as “No-System.”
We consider the 1890 institutions as land grant institutions, but we
identify them separately because they do not perform extension
activities.
Research Focus
NSF/SRS Survey of R&D Expenditures at Universities and
Colleges, FY 2006.
In addition to reporting expenditure data by source of funds,
NSF identifies in what major disciplines the money is expended.
In the Research by Discipline table we provide the proportion of
total and federal expenditures in each discipline for those institutions
with more than $40 million in federal research. These data
are useful for developing groups of similar institutions for peer
analysis.
The Institutional Characteristics table provides a summary
measure of an institution’s research strength and concentration
based on these discipline-level expenditures. Universities with
95-100% of their federal research dollars spent in one particular
2008 Annual Report
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