In the previous blog post, Reed Fawell makes the argument that America’s research universities are subsidizing their R&D programs to the tune of some $18 billion a year. The subsidies, which are especially high among public universities, contribute significantly to cost pressures that drive up undergraduate tuition. There is significant variability among universities and higher-ed systems in the fifty states, however. Does the national trend that Reed describes apply to Virginia?
Examine the table below. It breaks down sources of 2016 R&D spending for Virginia’s six leading research universities as well as the total for all U.S. universities. The column headed “institution” covers funding from university sources — tuition, state support, endowments, and the like. All told, Virginia’s six research universities contributed $478 million toward $1.39 billion in R&D.
How does that contribution compare to the national average for all universities? The following table tells the tale.
The average “institution” contribution for all U.S. universities is 25% of the total raised for research. Virginia Tech, George Mason University, the College of William & Mary (primarily the Virginia Institute of Marine Science), and Old Dominion University all exceeded the national average by wide margins. The University of Virginia and Virginia Commonwealth University fell short of the national average by small margins. In other words, Reed’s critique does apply to Virginia higher-ed institutions.
Furthermore, his argument that research funded by the universities themselves has increased in recent years applies to Virginia institutions as well. This table compares research funding from all sources (“total”) to funding paid with university resources in 2010 and 2016, a period which saw a surge in institutional funding nationally.
The raw numbers aren’t as meaningful as the change in the numbers. In the following table we see the increases in total funding and institutional funding, both in absolute dollars and expressed as a percentage.
Here the variability between individual institutions is evident. Between 2010 and 2016, ODU slashed its institutional support for R&D by $33 million, or 53%. Not surprisingly, total R&D funding declined by a similar amount, $27 million. William & Mary increased its institutional support modestly, by $1.2 million, or $6.3%, and its total R&D funding increase was likewise modest.
By contrast, Virginia Tech pumped $123 million additional institutional dollars into its research program in just four years, while UVa upped its ante by $69 million, VCU by $27 million, and GMU by $24 million.
Unfortunately, the National Science Foundation doesn’t tell us where these so-called “institution” dollars come from. Tuition increases? State aid? Gifts and endowment? Some other source entirely? We don’t know. If the institutional dollars came from gifts and endowments, students and taxpayers have little cause to complain. If the dollars came from state support or undergraduate tuition, it’s a very different story. But the NSF data is not granular enough to allow us to confirm Reed’s hypothesis — that undergraduate tuition is subsidizing research — for specific universities.
To do that, we need to dig deeper. While the universities do publish a lot more data than the NSF does, the data does not necessarily answer the questions we are asking. I’ll poke around and see what I can come up with.
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