At a time when earning a berth among the country’s elite research universities is more competitive than ever, many institutions have tried to improve their edge by spending more of their own money but have failed to see a payoff.
An analysis by The Chronicle of the 100 universities receiving the most federal research dollars in 1999 found that 27 of them at least doubled their own spending on research over the following decade, yet nearly half of those fell in the federal ranking.
Among those taking a dive were the State University of New York at Stony Brook, the University of Utah, and the New Mexico State University system, which together jacked up their own research spending by a combined $156.8-million compared with inflation-adjusted 1999 levels. The closely watched ranking of federal dollars for scientific and engineering research, compiled annually by the National Science Foundation, is a marker of institutional research prowess and prestige and can help the highest-scoring universities attract the best professors and graduate students.
Research spending is also a primary way by which universities are evaluated for acceptance into prestigious organizations like the Association of American Universities. The AAU, which represents 62 leading research institutions in North America, just dropped the University of Nebraska at Lincoln from its membership rolls after deciding that the institution no longer met its standards, and Syracuse University is expected to leave voluntarily for the same reason in the coming months.
The Chronicle analysis of NSF data found similar results for institutions ranked in the second tier of research universities. Nearly 40 institutions ranked between 101 and 200 in 1999 at least doubled their institutional spending on research over the past decade, but almost half of those fell in federal rank.
Scholars who study higher-education policy say the analysis shows that too many universities are trying to expand their research missions without developing smart enough strategies to capitalize on what they’re spending. The findings also pose questions about whether the country needs so many research universities and if in their quest to boost their rankings, institutions are shortchanging other campus priorities.
“A lot of institutions that have made this bet have lost,” said Jane V. Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. “People who think about research strategies are starting to say: We’re not improving anything other than running harder for less money.”
Spending More to Get More
The Chronicle’s analysis comes as higher education is footing an ever-growing proportion of the country’s bill for scholarly work. Over the past four decades, universities have seen their share of the country’s overall spending on research rise from 10 percent to 20 percent. Institutional spending on research reached $11.2-billion in 2009, an increase of 44 percent since 2004 after adjusting for inflation. Financing from all external sources rose only 23 percent, The Chronicle’s examination found.
Universities report the amount of their own institutional research expenditures to the NSF but do not say where they got the money or where it went. In fact, some administrators interviewed by The Chronicle were unsure how their total research receipts and expenditures stacked up.
“Funds come from so many different sources through so many different decision-making processes that it’s hard to compile all of it,” said David L. Wynes, Emory University’s vice president for research administration.
Conversations with administrators at several top research universities show that the internal money universities spend on research typically comes from a limited number of sources, including medical-center receipts, endowments—many of which grew exponentially with the economic boom of the last decade—payments the federal government gives institutions for the “indirect” costs of doing research, and—some say—from students, through tuition. Ironically, success in landing more outside federal research funds usually forces most universities to dig deeper into their own pockets, a dynamic that may have driven some of the reported increase in institutional research spending.
Many universities have long complained that federal grants do not adequately cover their overhead costs, that is, the costs of administering the research and of constructing and operating laboratories. The federal government partly reimburses those costs but has long capped reimbursements for administration, even while it has increased regulations on academic research.
The State University of New York’s Stony Brook campus illustrates how a university’s federal ranking can decline even as it pours more of its own money into research. According to what Stony Brook reported to the NSF, it boosted its own spending to $113.8-million in 2009 from $49.5-million, the inflation-adjusted level in 1999, an increase of 130 percent. But the $107.4-million in federal research money expended by Stony Brook in 2009 represented an 11-percent drop in inflation-adjusted terms, The Chronicle found. The university plummeted in the ranking of federal research money, from 53 to 97.
“Look, it’s always bad when federal money declines, because that’s the biggest pocket,” said John H. Marburger III, a past president of SUNY at Stony Brook who served as science adviser to President George W. Bush and is now Stony Brook’s vice president for research. As its federal funds have declined, said Mr. Marburger, the campus has concentrated on attracting more research money from corporations and state partnerships. (See related article on Page A4.)
The University of Utah’s spending of internal funds on research also shot up over the past decade, rising to $104.1-million in 2009, an increase of 256 percent after inflation. And while the university saw its federal funds for research rise by 33 percent, that wasn’t enough to maintain its position on the list of institutions receiving the most federal research dollars; Utah fell from 44 to 56.
Thomas N. Parks, vice president for research, said the university hasn’t been able to tap in to many sources of research money besides the federal government. “We don’t have a lot of big industrial companies doing research,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of endowment, so we are underinvested in research infrastructure.”
While the university saw a rise in federal research money, it can expand that by only so much, said Mr. Parks. Utah increased its full-time faculty between 1999 and 2009 by just 10 percent, which is less than what most other top research universities did.
“At some point, the people we have are maxed out in terms of the research dollars they can bring in and what they can handle,” he said. “Other schools have gotten more money because they have grown their faculties by more than we have.”
Mr. Parks said all of the extra internal money that Utah spent on research came from funds the federal government gave the institution as reimbursement for the indirect costs of pursuing federal projects. (Those reimbursements include, for example, the university’s costs in previous years to construct research laboratories.) The university simply turned that money back into general support for research—primarily for things like animal care, computing services, graduate students’ tuition stipends, and operating research facilities, said Mr. Parks.
“We haven’t been able to take millions and millions and put them into a few big new research initiatives on the campus.”
Vanderbilt University, on the other hand, has done just that. By raising its own spending on research by 192 percent over the decade The Chronicle observed, to $55.9-million, the university has transformed its scholarly profile, said Dennis G. Hall, Vanderbilt’s vice provost for research. The university saw a 123-percent increase in federal funds and zoomed up the federal rankings, from 42 to 24.
Mr. Hall said the key to Vanderbilt’s success was its coordinated effort to ramp up its research endeavors. In 2000 it cashed out a $100-million discretionary endowment fund and, over 10 years, it invested the money in a variety of new research programs in science, engineering, the humanities, and education.
“The deans here decided to lock arms and march in the same direction and build the strength of graduate education and research across the board,” said Mr. Hall. “This is a matter of careful study and choosing wisely.”
Where the Money Comes From
While putting institutional money into research may pay off for some institutions, experts on higher-education finances question what else gives when research spending is a top priority.
“In general, universities lose money on research, and there are allegations—though people don’t want to make it public—that undergraduate tuition is partially covering the cost of research,” said Ronald G. Ehrenberg, director of Cornell University’s Higher Education Research Institute. In a study published in 2007, Mr. Ehrenberg found a correlation between research spending and higher tuition. Institutions that expanded their own research spending the most, he found, were more likely than their peers to increase their student-faculty ratio, to substitute lecturers for tenured professors, and to raise tuition by a greater amount.
The effects of increased spending were small, though, adding only about $300 to tuition at private research institutions and almost nothing to public tuitions, for example.
None of the institutions The Chronicle spoke to said they had used tuition checks to pay for research. Indeed, most said the amount they charged students didn’t even cover the full cost of education. But Mr. Ehrenberg and others said tuition subsidizes research in hidden ways. Faculty members at research universities teach fewer courses per semester than their counterparts at teaching colleges, on the theory that they use the extra time to keep up with their fields—something that improves both their teaching and their research. But that so-called release time is counted as an “instructional expenditure” by the federal government. That means some of the funds classified as instruction actually are used to support faculty research, said Mr. Ehrenberg.
“This is really the major institutional investment in research, but it is deeply hidden,” said Mark S. Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes for Research. “If you go to a state legislator and say, How much is the state putting into academic research?, they will say, Oh, we don’t have a research budget. But you’ll say: Do you know your faculty at research institutions teach only two courses a semester, so you are subsidizing 50 percent of their time which is being spent on research?”
James J. Duderstadt, president emeritus at the University of Michigan and a university professor of science and engineering there, said many institutions are trying to buy research prominence, but that comes at a price. “You dig yourself in a hole by accepting grants that require that you then heavily subsidize them by other missions of your institution,” he says. “They are essentially robbing Peter to pay Paul.”
That isn’t likely to end soon, as the prestige of both faculty members and university leaders is tied to research success. “Let’s say someone is a provost at a second- or third-tier institution, and he or she wants to move up,” said William G. Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California. “The way you move up is to say: ‘While I was provost, I doubled the research at my university.’ And we go: Oh, my. He doubled the research funding at his university. And the board goes: Wow.”
The same thing happens again, said Mr. Tierney, when the provost wants to become president. “You say, ‘I doubled my research funding again.’ It’s an emblem,” says Mr. Tierney. “But we need to look hard and fast at if we need all of these research universities.”
