Johns Hopkins tops the List for Expenditures in Research & Development

University of California San Diego

High-profile research universities, many of which are members of Association of American Universities, provide many benefits for undergraduates on the fast-track to professional or graduate school programs.  In part, this is because of the level of funding these schools receive from the federal government as well as from industry and nonprofit organizations.

And despite an anemic economy, it appears that big money continues to flow to big name national research universities.

According to a study recently published by the National Science Foundation, university spending on research and development in all fields increased 6.9 percent between FY 2009 and FY 2010 to $61.2 billion.

Among the ten broad fields studied, life sciences accounted for the largest share by far ($34.9 billion) with engineering the next largest ($9.3 billion) in reported research and development expenditures.  All of the fields saw in an increase in reported expenditures except for social sciences, which declined by more than 4 percent.

Of the 742 institutions surveyed, the top university in terms of expenditures was Johns Hopkins University with over $2 billion dedicated to research and development, most of which came from the federal government.

If you’re considering spending the next four years at a research university and want to know where the money is (which supports labs, attracts professors, and opens opportunities), here is a list of institutions reporting the largest FY 2010 R&D expenditures in all fields:

1.  Johns Hopkins University
2.  University of Michigan—Ann Arbor
3. University of Wisconsin—Madison
4. University of Washington
5.  Duke
6.  UC San Diego
7. UCLA
8.  UC San Francisco
9. Stanford University
10. University of Pennsylvania 
11.  University of Pittsburgh
12.  Columbia University
13. University of Minnesota—Twin Cities
14. Pennsylvania State University
15.  University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill
16. Ohio State University
17.  Cornell University
18. Washington University St. Louis
19. UC Berkeley
20. Texas A & M
21. University of Florida
22.  UC Davis
23. MIT
24.  Yale University
25. Georgia Tech

This concludes a two-part series on national research universities.