A record-breaking number of Congressional pork-barrel projects this year has loaded college and university plates with more of these controversial grants than ever before. The number of institutions receiving earmarks has shot up despite growing worries that the noncompetitive grants undermine the American scientific enterprise, and in spite of promises by some lawmakers to cut back.

An exclusive analysis by The Chronicle shows that legislators channeled more than 2,300 projects to 920 institutions, mostly for research, in the 2008 fiscal year. That is a 25-percent increase in the number of colleges and universities over 2003, when The Chronicle last surveyed earmarks. The total dollar amount for 2008 is at least $2.25-billion. The spending is a slight increase from five years ago, though it is a bit lower when adjusted for inflation. But it is a huge jump from 10 years ago, when pork spending totaled $528-million.

Earmarks are given out by members of Congress — without review of the projects’ merits by knowledgeable scientists — by sprinkling the money into annual spending bills to favor constituents. This year, for the first time, it is possible to see just how widespread the practice is: A new law requires Congress to identify the sponsor of every earmark.

The numbers and names show “a system that’s out of control,” says Michael S. Lubell, director of public affairs at the American Physical Society.

The danger of increased earmarking, critics charge, is that it continues even as legislators have fallen behind in spending for scientific grants awarded the conventional way, through open competition and peer review. Competition is widely regarded as having made America’s science the world’s best, and the strength of that science has helped make America’s economy the world’s biggest. Earmarks have neither beneficial effect, some studies suggest, and other countries’ research and trade are catching up.

The dirty little secret about earmarks for science is that while college officials occasionally fret about them in public, they chase them in private. At meetings of the Association of American Universities, a group of 62 research institutions, some presidents regularly complain that earmarks are squeezing out peer-reviewed awards — “and then they go home and call up their congressman to ask for an earmark,” said one president, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to be free to discuss the meetings.

Politicians are similarly conflicted. On the presidential-campaign trail, earmarks are getting high-profile attention. Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, battling for the Democratic slot, supported a one-year moratorium, though they both handed out generous earmarks to colleges last year. Sen. John McCain, the expected Republican nominee, wants to abolish them. But members of both parties in Congress are likely to maintain their support for earmarks.

A Zero-Sum Game?

Some of this year’s academic pork went for campus roads, classroom buildings, and other construction projects, but two-thirds, or $1.6-billion, was directed to scientific research at almost 500 institutions, The Chronicle’s analysis shows. That represents about 5 percent of all federal money for academic research.

The war in Iraq and rising gasoline prices clearly influenced the topics of earmarked research, sparking interest in studies of brain and spinal-cord injuries, biofuels, and fuel cells. (See articles.)

Compared with 2003, the average value of earmarks for higher education has dropped because Congress spread roughly the same amount around many more projects. For 2008, the median earmark was $462,000, down from $497,000 in 2003.

That’s not the only change in how research is supported. Until a few years ago, Congress had been raising spending for peer-reviewed grants much more than it had for earmarks. The budget of the National Institutes of Health doubled between 1998 and 2003, to $27-billion.

But since 2003, peer-reviewed federal research grants have become significantly harder to win, making earmarks more difficult to ignore. The budgets of the NIH and the National Science Foundation, the two principal federal sources for academic research money, have declined, considering inflation. In 2008 each agency expects to approve about one in five grant applications, down from one in three in 2001.

A stream of university representatives have visited Capitol Hill in recent months to plead for relief. They warn that the tight budgets are driving talented young scientists away from research and damaging the country’s capacity for innovation. Congress took note of the issue last year and passed the America Competes Act, which promised to double spending on the NSF and other physical-sciences programs over seven years.

But the legislators have already fallen short of this goal. Most of the increase proposed for 2008 was cut from the final version of a spending bill after Democrats and the president deadlocked over government spending.

That underscores what is arguably a trade-off between money for earmarks and for peer-reviewed work. Consider that the $1.6-billion in Congressional earmarks for academic research this year could have paid for the entire increase called for by the America Competes Act in 2008, with $1-billion to spare. If that money were given to the NIH, it would have allowed the agency’s budget to keep pace with inflation.

University officials talk up spending for merit-based awards when they visit their Congressional representatives, but they send mixed messages by requesting earmarks during the same meetings, said a higher-education lobbyist, who asked not to be named so he could speak freely about the private sessions. Given that the earmarked money is guaranteed to come to a lawmaker’s district and money for peer-reviewed grants is not, “which part of the message do you think the member is going to listen to?” he says.

Lawmakers, of course, are aware that it’s far easier to claim credit for a direct earmark. In news releases sent to their home districts, they regularly boast about their successes at delivering the money to colleges.

Institutions that receive lots of research earmarks are unapologetic about accepting them with open arms. Take Mississippi State University, which topped The Chronicle’s list of institutions receiving the most earmarks in 2008. The institution pursues the set-asides because “we’re in a poor state,” says Kirk H. Schulz, vice president for research and economic development. He credits earmarks for helping Mississippi State lay the groundwork — by starting research programs — that has increased the money it gets for peer-reviewed federal awards. (But that growth has not been remarkable, roughly matching the average for all academic institutions.)

Other Choices Explored

That claim, that earmarks help colleges with few resources improve themselves, has hardly ever been scrutinized independently. One of the few such studies, by James D. Savage, a University of Virginia political scientist, found that the majority of colleges that secured large amounts of the noncompetitive grants actually dropped in the rankings for total federal research money received.

Mr. Savage says that defenders of the noncompetitive grants ignore that major federal science agencies set aside a pool of money for peer-reviewed grants to help develop the research capacity of universities like Mississippi State. Awards made by the NSF’s Epscor program (short for Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) are reserved for colleges in 24 states, most of them rural or small in population, that historically received small shares of federal research dollars.

The trouble is that Congress has financed these programs far less generously than its research earmarks. The NSF program’s budget is only $111-million this year. Similar programs in other agencies provide an additional $291-million.

Earmarks are also avidly pursued by major research universities that win many peer-reviewed grants and can hardly plead poverty. Mr. Lubell, a professor of physics at the City University of New York’s City College, suggests that those institutions should give up earmarks and present a united front to Congress in favor of healthy increases for peer-reviewed science.

That’s been tried before, though, and it was a dismal failure. The Association of American Universities asked members to volunteer to give up earmarks in the 1980s. The effort fell apart when most of the members continued to get earmarks anyway.

Then, as now, large research universities worried that if they turn away from earmarks would not divert the money to peer-reviewed awards. Instead, lawmakers would simply give more earmarks to other colleges.

As the president of one of these institutions puts it, “No one wants to be a chump.”

2 of 3 Presidential Candidates Have Earmarked Money For Colleges

All three presidential candidates are U.S. senators and have track records of setting aside federal dollars for academe.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton ranked sixth in earmarked money among all senators in 2008. (She cosponsored almost all of these projects for New York’s colleges with her state’s other senator, Charles E. Schumer, a fellow Democrat who ranked seventh.)

Sen. Barack Obama, of Illinois, her rival for the Democratic nomination, fell in the middle of the pack, at 55th.

The presumed Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, of Arizona, has long criticized earmarks as wasteful and has not sponsored any. He has promised a total ban if elected president. But it’s likely he would face a fierce fight with both parties in Congress.

Despite the two Democrats’ past support for earmarks, they joined Mr. McCain this month in endorsing a proposal in Congress for a one-year moratorium on the noncompetitive grants. The Senate rejected the measure, which was meant to give legislators time to develop increased accountability requirements for recipients.

How The States Rank in Academic Pork