Useful Stats: 2000 Academic R&D Expenditures by State

Annual R&D expenditures at America's academic institutions topped $30 billion for the first time, according to the early release tables from the National Science Foundation's Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, Fiscal Year 2000. The final results of the latest annual survey reveals a nine percent increase over 1999 expenditures.

Despite growing by more than $1.4 billion during 2000, the federal government's share of total support for academic R&D, at 58.19 percent, fell to its lowest percentage since 1959. State and local government share dropped to 7.33 percent, the lowest level since the survey began in 1953. Institutional funds, on the other hand, accounted for 19.71 percent of academic R&D expenditures in 2000, the highest level ever for this source of funding.

Industrial support of academic R&D, as a percent of the total academic R&D expenditures, was its greatest in the 1950s at more than eight percent. Since falling to its lowest level of 2.45 percent in 1966, the surveys have reported a slow growth in industrial-financed R&D to the 1999 level of 7.4 percent. The 2000 survey finds industrial R&D support slipping slightly to 7.25 percent of the total support for

academic R&D, while growing to $2.176 billion.

PDF and Excel versions of the survey results are available online for 69 different tables, several of which may be of value for state and local tech-based economic development practitioners. Data are presented by source of funds, field of science & engineering, geographic distribution, and by institution. Separate tables highlight expenditures within historically black colleges and universities and for R&D equipment expenditures. Many of the tables include data for the previous eight years (1993-2000).

Because of the important role academic R&D can play in encouraging state and local tech-based economic development, SSTI has prepared two tables for Digest readers standardizing the data for comparison across states. The first, available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/010402t.htm, presents figures and rankings for total and per capita academic R&D expenditures by state for 1993 and 2000. The table also shows the percentage change and rankings for the eight-year period. The manipulation reveals Maine — while only improving its overall ranking from 50th to 49th for total academic R&D expenditures — showed the greatest improvement on a per capita basis over the time period by capturing 114 percent more R&D funding in 2000. Top honors for 2000 academic R&D expenditures on a per capita basis go, in descending order, to the District of Columbia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Alaska and Iowa.

As many state and local tech-based ED programs strive to increase and strengthen university-industrial research partnerships, SSTI's second table examines only those academic R&D expenditures for 1993 and 2000 that were financed from industrial sources. The table is available at: http://www.ssti.org/Digest/Tables/010402t2.htm

The second table reveals that, during a eight-year span when industrial-financed R&D grew by more than 61 percent, it was declining in several states on both real dollar and per capita bases. On a more positive note, Hawaii's industrial R&D support grew from a 1993 level of $151,000 to $11.158 million in 2000. Alaska showed the second best performance by quadrupling industrial R&D funding levels.

The early release tables from the Survey of Research and Development Expenditures at Universities and Colleges, Fiscal Year 2000 are available here: http://www.nsf.gov/cgi-bin/getpub?srs02402