Useful Stats

Understanding enrollment trends at the nation’s institutions of higher education — an important indicator of the knowledge capital and skilled workforce available to local innovation economies — is paramount in developing appropriate strategies to bolster local and regional innovation and entrepreneurship. While many institutional reports cover only one or a few years’ worth of enrollment data, evaluating long-run trends can help policymakers and program designers identify issues that might otherwise be hidden, enabling the development of more effective policies and programs.

This edition of Useful Stats builds on last week’s analysis of data for spring term enrollment at degree-granting institutions of higher education from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC). SSTI compiled data from several NSCRC reports to explore the 10-year trends in spring term enrollment per 1,000 residents by state from 2012 to 2021.

Enrollment in the nation’s institutions of higher education is an important indicator of the knowledge capital available to local innovation economies. This edition of Useful Stats explores enrollment data from the recently updated National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC) report , Current Term Enrollment Estimates, covering spring term enrollment trends at degree-granting institutions of higher education. Specifically, this analysis examines enrollment per 1,000 residents by state*, the change in total enrollment over prior spring terms, as well as enrollment by type of institution by state from spring term 2019 to spring term 2021.

Enrollment per 1,000 residents

This edition of Useful Stats explores data from the U.S. Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) on new utility and plant patents granted in the U.S. by state/territory for the five-year period from 2016 to 2020. This analysis includes only utility and plant patents as these types are those associated with the invention of new products and services, and excludes reissued patents and those issued for purely aesthetic designs.

State patent activity is a good indicator of the health of local innovation economies. Patents for innovative products and processes are issued to inventors across academia, industry, and the public sector, and the number of these new patents issued in states over time can provide insights into the strengths of these sectors and how well they are collectively able to bring innovative technologies out of the lab and, potentially, to market. Understanding this patent activity can help program and policy designers in local innovation economies in evaluating, enhancing, and developing their initiatives.

Federally funded R&D is a pillar of the U.S. innovation economy, and understanding how that funding is disbursed among the various performers within a state can help regional innovation leaders in developing, designing and implementing investment strategies, programs, and policies. This edition of Useful Stats builds on a previous SSTI analysis of NSF’s recently-updated data on federal R&D funding obligations in 2019, and examines how that funding is distributed within states among industry, universities and colleges, federal agencies, Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs), other nonprofits, and state and local governments.

Nationally in 2019, the majority of the $138.2 billion in federal R&D funds went to industry performers (31.4 percent), followed by federal agencies (27.8 percent), universities and colleges (24 percent), FFRDCs (10.4 percent), other nonprofits (6 percent), and state and local governments (0.4 percent).

The level of federal R&D funding within a state can have important implications for local innovation economies. As such, understanding the amount of federal R&D funding and which agencies provide that funding within a state can help regional innovation leaders in designing and implementing programs and policies. This edition of Useful Stats explores NSF’s recently updated data on federal R&D funding obligations in 2019 by state and agency.

Increasing by $12.4 billion over 2018, federal R&D funding reached $138.2 billion in 2019. However, federal R&D spending in states varied widely as seen in the interactive map below. In 2019, the states that had the greatest levels of federal R&D funding were California ($19.2 billion), Maryland ($16.9 billion), Virginia ($8 billion), Massachusetts ($6.8 billion), and the District of Columbia ($6.2 billion). The states with the least amount of federal R&D funding were Vermont ($120 million), South Dakota ($88.9 million), Puerto Rico ($81.8 million), North Dakota ($73 million), and Wyoming ($67.7 million).

An SSTI data analysis finds that in FY 2020, small businesses were less successful in obtaining Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) funding from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) — particularly from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — than they were in FY 2019. NIH provides more funding to the SBIR/STTR program in total than the other participating civilian agency combined, and is also the top funder of the program within most states among the civilian agencies.

The overall employment outlook for the recipients of doctorate degrees earned at U.S. institutions has improved from 2015 to 2019, while the research activities conducted by these highly trained and educated individuals has started to shift away from basic and applied research activities towards activities focused on design and development. Doctorate recipients play an essential role in developing the knowledge base leveraged in creating new technologies and companies in the innovation economy. Understanding the employment trends of this vital group can help in crafting programs and policies to strengthen local innovation economies.

Pulling from the NSF’s recently updated Survey of Doctorate Recipients, this edition of Useful Stats provides an analysis of labor force participation, unemployment, and involuntarily working out-of-field rates of doctorate recipients with degrees earned at U.S. institutions and who still live and work in the United States. This analysis also considers the shares of employed doctorate recipients who primarily conduct Research and Development (R&D) activities at their jobs.

Labor Force

Although the nation’s nonmetropolitan economies are less reliant on the R&D activity performed by institutions of higher education than the economies of urban areas, researchers in some rural areas show levels of higher education R&D (HERD) expenditures per R&D employee that are on par, or even exceed, their urban counterparts. Policy makers may wish to consider and prioritize the relative “outsized” importance of HERD funding and related research personnel in future policy decisions and public investments that are geared toward select smaller communities and rural places. For instance, innovation-oriented entrepreneurship concentrates around R&D-rich, knowledge centers, and this data indicates that there are non-metropolitan areas that fit that description.

The R&D performed at colleges and universities is an important driver for the innovation economy — generating new knowledge, spurring invention, training STEM talent, and supporting economic development. This edition of SSTI’s Useful Stats analyzes metropolitan-level data for 2019 from the National Science Foundation on higher education R&D (HERD) expenditures and personnel. Nearly 981,000 individuals in higher education across the U.S. were classified as R&D personnel in 2019. As shown by the green shading in the interactive map below, the metropolitan areas with the greatest total number of HERD personnel in 2019 were Baltimore, Maryland* (44,323); New York-Newark-Jersey City (43,103); Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim, California (35,796); Boston-Cambridge-Newton (35,587); and Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington (27,147).

States often estimate their participation in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program by counting the number of awards made, total of award value, or (when available) the success rate of applications in their state. In this edition of SSTI Useful Stats, we attempt to go beyond these measures to estimate states’ untapped potential for capturing future SBIR awards. This creates a baseline proxy for tailoring and assessing a state’s outreach and support activities.

While the traditional measures of SBIR participation are important, only the success rate begins to reveal potential future growth for a state’s SBIR participation. Another approach is to estimate the participation rate in SBIR among companies that are similar to a typical SBIR awardee. Of course, identifying “similar” firms is a challenge, as there are many factors that determine which companies are willing and able to participate in the program.

Metropolitan areas in the U.S. with fewer than 370,000 residents are more likely to be more economically reliant on R&D performed by colleges and universities than larger metros, according to new SSTI analysis. Three data points are used to consider how R&D at institutions of higher education is impacting a region’s economy: NSF’s Higher Education R&D (HERD) data on expenditures at individual institutions; metro area Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis; and population estimates from the Census Bureau. The resulting analysis shows that despite larger metro areas producing a greater total amount of HERD, they are typically less reliant on these expenditures directly powering their economies.

Given higher education’s role in generating the knowledge that catalyzes innovative new technologies developed by high-growth startups, R&D conducted at institutions of higher education is one of the most important metrics for evaluating an area’s innovation economy. This edition of Useful Stats examines NSF’s recently updated Higher Education R&D (HERD) survey, finding that most states, although not all, experienced growth in HERD expenditures from 2018 to 2019. This analysis also examines 2019 state HERD expenditures by R&D field, finding that life sciences accounted for the lion’s share of HERD spending in every state except Alaska, typically followed by either engineering; the physical sciences; or the geological, atmospheric, and ocean sciences.