Which Colleges Spent the Most Money on Research?

Colleges spent $97.8 billion on research and development in the 2022 fiscal year, up $8 billion from the year before, according to new data from the National Science Foundation.

Federally supported research accounted for about 60 percent of the increase, 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 $8 billion in additional research spending represented a 9 percent increase over the previous year, though inflation devoured most of it.

As has been the case for decades, the Johns Hopkins University led the nation’s colleges in research spending, with expenditures of $3.4 billion. The figure includes $2.1 billion in funding for its Applied Physics Laboratory. Hopkins is one of 29 universities that spent at least $1 billion on research and development in the 2022 fiscal year, up from 21 institutions a year earlier.

Research and development supported by the federal government rose nearly 10 percent in the 2022 fiscal year, to $54 billion, and accounts for about 55 percent of research funding at all universities. The next largest source of research-and-development funds, 25.1 percent, came from the institutions themselves and totaled $24.5 billion. The share of all research funded by institutions has been roughly the same since 2016, the report said.

The foundation collected data from 900 institutions that award bachelor’s degrees or higher and that spent at least $150,000 in research-and-development funds in the 2022 fiscal year. Here’s more from the data: