Approaching the Campus Budget - Part II

External Funding

All research universities turn to outside funding to enhance and build on their internal investment in research. These outside funds come from many sources, but the largest amount usually comes from federal agencies that support research. Our campus competes for and successfully wins about $95 million in external grants, contracts, and other federal support for research and training. The university spends at least $39 million on other costs in support of this funded research. Adding to this the $23 million in faculty salaries allocated to research, the campus invests about $62 million to earn the institution $95 million in external research funding. The return on the investment in research is quite good.

This part of the university’s research economy, of course, is only a partial accounting of the research production. Much of the campus’ research quality and productivity does not appear in calculations of grant and contract revenue, particularly in the humanities, the social sciences, and in such units as education or management. Nonetheless, the more dollars the campus can acquire from external agencies the more it can do in all fields with its internal dollars.

As this discussion indicates, the limit on what the campus can do in expanding its research quality and productivity is bound by the amount of money it can spend on research. Any improvement in incentives or management of campus research funds, any increase in alternative sources of revenue to support research, will result in better performance for the university.

To put this competition into perspective we need to recognize the nature of the national competitive marketplace for sponsored research. While it is difficult to acquire complete data on university research competitiveness, most observers believe that the rate of federal expenditures on research is the best indicator of institutional research competitiveness. This is not because the absolute dollar value of research indicates quality but because the dollars come from a national competition in which all major research universities, public and private, participate. The federal research expenditures serve as a form of score keeping that provides the most reliable data point we have. Other indicators of research competitiveness also exist, and those for which we have good data appear in the annual publication The Top American Research Universities, available online at thecenter.ufl.edu for those interested in the issues of measurement.

Over the decade 1991-2000, the federal research marketplace grew, in constant dollars, by about 23%. Universities whose federal expenditures also grew at this rate maintained their market share in this competition, those whose growth failed to meet this level, declined. UMass Amherst grew by about 29% in this period, which, given the circumstances under which this campus operates, is a strong showing. Even though the campus external research enterprise grew respectably during this decade, some universities grew even more and some declined, leaving us in about the same relative position among our peers at the end of the decade.

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