Where Research Spending Keeps Going Up

In the 2020 fiscal year, the Johns Hopkins University spent more on research and development than any other U.S. higher-education institution, concluding a decade during which research spending at the university grew by roughly $1 billion.

According to newly released data from the National Science Foundation, Hopkins — which has led the nation’s colleges and universities in research spending for more than 40 years — had research-and-development expenditures of $3.1 billion. The figure includes $1.9 billion in funding for its Applied Physics Laboratory.

At all U.S. colleges and universities, research-and-development spending totaled $86.4 billion in 2020 — up 3.3 percent from the prior fiscal year.

The increase is the lowest since the 2015 fiscal year, the foundation said in a report on its annual Higher Education Research and Development Survey, which is sponsored by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics.

The slowdown in the growth of research spending is attributed to the early months of the pandemic, which overlapped with the end of the 2020 fiscal year and spurred a disruption in research activity. In fact, data from the survey revealed that in June 2020 only about a third of colleges with research spending of at least $1 million could perform “all” or “almost all” of their research and development.

The largest share of research funding, 53 percent, came from the federal government. Federally-supported research rose 3.7 percent, to $46.2 billion. The next greatest source of research funds for colleges, 25 percent, was from institutions themselves and totaled $22 billion — an increase of 4 percent.

The foundation collected data from 915 institutions that award bachelor’s degrees or higher and that spent at least $150,000 in research-and-development funds in the 2019 fiscal year. Here’s a closer look at the data: