SCIENCE & ENGINEERING INDICATORS

1 Data in this section are drawn from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics National Patterns of R&D Resources, the same source used in Indicators 2020 report “Research and Development: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons.” Totals from this source may differ from those used in the rest of the report, which are from the Higher Education Research and Development Survey (2010 onward) and its predecessor, the Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges (1972–2009), for reasons outlined in more detail in endnote 4. The 13% in this sentence is calculated based on $71.3 billion in higher education R&D expenditures from NCSES NP 2018.

2 A concise description of the differences between basic and applied research is available at http://www.sjsu.edu/people/fred.prochaska/courses/ScWk170/s0/Basic-vs.-Applied-Research.pdf.

3 U.S. basic research in 2017 totaled $91.5 billion. Businesses were the second-largest performer of basic research (27%).

4 In the rest of this report, financial data on academic R&D are drawn from the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey (2010 onward) and its predecessor, the Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges (1972–2009). HERD data are in current-year dollars and are reported on an academic year basis. For example, FY 2018 covers July 2017–June 2018 for most institutions and is referred to in this report as 2018. Comparisons over more than 1 year are made in inflation-adjusted constant 2012 dollars using gross domestic product implicit price deflators based on calendar year. Gross domestic product deflators come from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis and are available at https://www.bea.gov/national, accessed August 2019. The totals presented from HERD differ from similar totals reported in NCSES’s National Patterns of R&D Resources and Indicators 2020 report “Research and Development: U.S. Trends and International Comparisons.” These other sources remove approximately $6 billion in pass-through funds that are double-counted in the HERD totals because such funds are counted by the universities initially receiving the money and by the universities to which the funds are passed. These other sources also present calendar year approximations based on fiscal year data.

5 Applied research has increased from 25% to 28%, and development has increased from 9% to 10%.

6 The remainder, $3.3 billion (8%), is awarded by all other federal agencies.

7 The largest changes were the funding shares of the Department of Defense, which increased from 10% in 2008 to 14% in 2018, and HHS, which decreased from 58% to 55% during this same interval.

8 Unrecovered indirect costs are calculated as the difference between an institution’s negotiated indirect cost rate on a sponsored project and the amount that it recovers from the sponsor. Committed cost sharing is the sum of the institutional contributions required by the sponsor for specific projects (mandatory cost sharing) and the institutional resources made available to a specific project at the discretion of the grantee institution (voluntary cost sharing). For more on unrecovered indirect costs, see the section Cost Components of Academic R&D.

9 The accounting systems or administrative practices of some universities, including some with highest research activity, do not enable the separation of the R&D component of multipurpose accounts. Because the HERD Survey measures only spending that is fully budgeted as R&D for these institutions, reported institutional funds are less than the full amount of academic R&D that the schools fund. More details on efforts to improve the measurement of institutionally financed R&D are in the HERD Technical Notes, available at https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/herd/2018/herd18-tech-notes.pdf.

10 The 2018 HERD Survey included 915 institutions that had reported $150,000 or more in R&D expenditures during the previous fiscal year. For more detail on the survey population, see (NCSES HERD 2018: Table A-4).

11 Whether an institution is operated by publicly elected or appointed officials, or by privately elected or appointed officials and derives its major source of funds from private sources, is referred to as its control.

12 The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/) is widely used to characterize differences in academic institutions. The Basic Classification categorizes academic institutions primarily based on highest degree conferred, level of degree production, and research activity. This report uses the 2015 Carnegie classification. This categorization does not include some academic institutions that are top R&D performers but whose training programs are exclusively focused on a small number of fields (i.e., exclusively biomedically focused institutions). Note that although the 2018 Carnegie classification contains revised names and institutional memberships in some categories, it does not change the main findings in this report. In 2018, the Carnegie-classified “highest research activity” doctoral universities received around three-quarters of the totals provided by each main academic R&D funding source, with the exception of state and local government funding (about 63%). These institutions also received the vast majority of funds from the top six federal agencies, ranging from 70% (USDA) to 86% (DOE).

13 Of the 915 institutions included in the 2018 HERD Survey, 523 (57%) were public institutions and 392 (43%) were private institutions (NCSES HERD 2018: Table A-4). Among the 115 highest research activity doctoral universities, 81 (70%) are public. Among the 60 U.S. institutions that are members of the Association of American Universities, 34 (57%) are public (https://www.aau.edu/who-we-are/our-members). Additionally, public universities, although less numerous overall, tend to be larger, as they enroll more students and award more degrees (Indicators 2020 report “Higher Education in Science and Engineering”).

14 These summations are of top R&D performers overall and include some institutions not in the highest research activity category. Johns Hopkins University includes the Applied Physics Laboratory, with $1.5 billion in total R&D expenditures in FY 2018.

15 In 2018, public universities received $1.1 billion (92%) of USDA’s funding for academic R&D. Almost all of that funding ($1.0 billion) went to the 77 public land grant institutions reporting expenditures.

16 A total of 94 of these universities are public, and 62 are private.

17 Of the 115 doctoral universities with “highest research activity,” 71 reported medical school expenditures, including 47 public universities and 24 private universities.

18 As shown in Figure 5b-13, the percentage of total support for non-S&E fields provided by the federal government was lower, at less than 30%.

19 However, the amount of academic R&D provided by each agency is not proportional to the number of graduate students supported. For example, for the most recent year of data, HHS funded more than four times as much academic R&D as NSF but supported about the same number of graduate students as NSF.

20 An infographic displaying the difference between direct and indirect costs is available at https://www.aau.edu/sites/default/files/Costs-of-Research-Infographic.pdf. The history of indirect cost reimbursement in the context of the university–government research partnership is reviewed in Droegemeier (2017).

21 The academic R&D reported here includes separately accounted-for R&D and related recovered indirect costs. It also includes committed cost sharing and institutional estimates of unrecovered indirect costs associated with externally funded R&D projects. Some indirect costs are recovered as a result of indirect-cost proposals that universities submit based on their actual costs from the previous year.

22 Unrecovered indirect costs as a percentage of total institutional spending on R&D were about 27.5% for private universities and 27.0% for public universities.

23 More details on these and other research space trends are available on the NSF website for the Survey of Science and Engineering Research Facilities at https://nsf.gov/statistics/srvyfacilities/.

24 Capitalized equipment is collected on the NCSES HERD Survey as payments for movable equipment exceeding an institution’s capitalization threshold, including ancillary costs such as delivery and setup.

25 The $79.3 billion noted here includes only institutions reporting $1 million or more in total R&D expenditures in FY 2017. Institutions reporting less than $1 million in total R&D expenditures in FY 2017 completed a shorter version of the NCSES HERD Survey form in FY 2018 that did not include a question on research equipment. Respondents to the short form questionnaire accounted for $151 million (0.2%) of total R&D expenditures in FY 2018.