Many institutions of higher education spend millions of dollars each year on R&D, with 37 having spent over $1 billion in FY 2024. These expenditures are made to drive innovation and create new technologies, methodologies, and more. Past SSTI coverage of the new FY 2024 Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey data release has explored the geographic spread of HERD expenditures at the state level. This edition of Useful Stats will explore HERD survey data at the institutional level for the 50 largest institutions by R&D expenditures and the sources of funds to allow them to conduct their work.
All data used in this article are from the HERD Survey’s FY 2024 data release, available here. Refer to the HERD Survey methodology page for more details on the data and its limitations.
A brief look at overall HERD expenditures at top institutions
Some readers may ask why one would look at the top 50 institutions as its own subgroup. The answer is simply because of their overwhelming dominance and influence over the aggregate data. Of the 681 universities in the standard form of the HERD survey (those with at least $1 million in HERD expenditures), the top 20 institutions accounted for 31% of all HERD expenditures from the standard form population. The top 10 accounted for 18%, and the top five accounted for 11% (note that the APL alone accounts for just over 2% of the standard form HERD expenditure total).
Johns Hopkins University, as it has been for the past decade, is by far the leader in HERD expenditures due to its inclusion of the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL). Excluding the $2.55 billion in total R&D expenditures in FY 2024 from the APL, the university drops in rank to 13th overall.
The University of Pennsylvania ranked second in FY 2024 with $2.18 billion in HERD expenditures. The University of California, San Francisco followed at $2.13 billion, and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor at $2.11 billion.
Figure 1 below shows the top 50 institutions by FY 2024 HERD expenditures and their values since FY 2010. Hovering over any point or searching for an institution with the search function under the year toggle will reveal the past ten years of available data.
Figure 1: Top 50 institutions by FY 2024 HERD expenditures, FY 2010-2024
How are the top institutions by HERD expenditures financing their R&D?
The main funding source for HERD expenditures is the federal government, with 55% of all HERD expenditures federally financed in recent years. However, not all universities’ R&D expenditures are funded this way; of the top 50 institutions by overall HERD expenditures, the percentage of HERD that is federally funded ranges from 21% at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center to 88% at Johns Hopkins University (note that this value includes the APL, and the institution with the next largest proportion of federally financed HERD expenditures is the Georgia Institute of Technology at 79%).
Apart from the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, which is itself an outlier for how little federal R&D it receives compared to others in this group, all the 50 top universities by overall HERD expenditures are at least 40% federally financed, with 34 of the 50 having at least 50% of their HERD expenditures federally financed.
Figure 2 below includes a map of the top 50 institutions by FY 2024 HERD expenditures, this time sized by each’s proportion of expenditures that are federally financed. Hovering over any point or searching for an institution with the search function under the year toggle will reveal the past four years of available data.
Figure 2: Top 50 institutions by FY 2024 HERD expenditures, sized by percent federally funded
For those not primarily funded by the federal government, sources include state and local governments, institutional funds, businesses, nonprofits, and other sources. For example, while the federal government primarily funds Johns Hopkins University, institutional funds are the largest source of California State University at Fullerton’s HERD expenditures, and business funds are the largest source at the Milwaukee School of Engineering.
Figure 3 below presents a pie chart for each of the 925 higher education institutions from both the standard and short-form HERD Survey populations. Using the search bar, up to six institutions can be entered into the graphic to be seen at once.
Figure 3: HERD expenditures at higher education institutions in the standard short form survey populations, by source of funds, FY 2024
This page was prepared by SSTI using Federal funds under award ED22HDQ3070129 from the Economic Development Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce. The statements, findings, conclusions, and recommendations are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Economic Development Administration or the U.S. Department of Commerce.