CrazyPaco
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RE: ACC Member Schools by Age and Enrollment.
(07-10-2017 12:50 AM)opossum Wrote: (07-09-2017 01:30 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote: (07-08-2017 07:22 AM)nzmorange Wrote: (07-07-2017 05:33 PM)CrazyPaco Wrote: (07-07-2017 05:06 PM)nzmorange Wrote: Undergrads make up most of most school's alumni base, fan base, donor base, scholarship athlete base, and student base. It's also where the most relevant reputations are built for most schools, and by relevant, I mean the one that attracts the best students and dictates how the school functions (see Northeastern bending over backwards to improve its USNWR ranking for an example).
AAU membership is severely overblown. B1G posters loved it because it used to be the B1G's close to arbitrary academic-sounding selling point (the Pac was ARWU, the B1G had AAU, the ACC had/has USNWR, the BIG EAST has small private, etc.), and the rest of the internet message board picked it up because A) the B1G has a great PR machine because a conference of big public schools lives and dies by its ability to lobby, and B) because it creates an artificial sense of neatness, and posters like neat, cookie cutter solutions.
There are different matters of academic reputation that impact differing aspects of a university. Among research-intensive schools, research prowess, and thus the research environment of the institution, matters greatly, particularly for attracting faculty, graduate students, and post-docs, which ultimately impacts funding, because research academics want to be at institutions with great colleagues who are leaders in their fields where they can do substantial collaborations and have access to great core facilities and peer support. Undergrad excellence isn't completely disregarded, but it certainly doesn't overshadow graduate and professional programs scope or breadth, or particularly, an institution's research funding and output. The reputation of faculty in a particular field at any school is directly tied to these things in STEM research fields like engineering, physics, and health sciences. Reputations in academia are peer derived, and in research fields, faculty have to interact and be familiar with the work of their peers, so you know where the great faculty and research environments are in your field. This is necessarily captured in any rankings being produced to sell copy at a news stand. Honestly, within research fields, undergrad reputation means comparatively little within academia, but reputation can be more field specific and overall institutional reputation is less important.
Undergraduate education and graduate research are different spheres, not that they are completely devoid of overlap. But for the most part, not having strong graduate research programs doesn't hurt a school like BC one bit..because that is not its mission and its not competing against research-intensive schools for the same faculty or resources. Not having undergraduates doesn't harm UCSF one bit either. Neither does the fact it isn't part of the AAU, so yes, AAU membership is one of the most overblown aspects of that self-proclaimed conference realignment savants like to point to. They definitely like to compare apples and oranges and can't at all understand that they aren't the same just because they are both round.
What you wrote about the importance of research has a light relevance to grad students in non-stem fields. What does a JD care? What does an MBA care?
As you pointed out, it also has a light relevance to schools that don't emphasize research or grad students.
It also has virtually no relevance to anybody associated to one of the countless liberal arts schools that dot the country.
Taken together, it's just not that important for most people.
And research universities aren't too concerned with what liberal arts colleges are doing. Obviously two of the main sources of income for research universities are extramural research grants and student tuition. From an operational perspective, as long as you have enough demand for the relatively fixed number of undergraduate slots that enable you to be selective and maintain student quality control, there isn't much else to worry about. Most research universities have that already. However, many major research universities derive the largest slice of their operational income from extramural research grants, and tuition & fees may not even be a close second. At Duke, a school that is elite at both graduate and undergraduate operations, government and private grants and contracts accounted for 41% of operational revenue last year, while tuition accounts for just 17%. At Stanford, is is 28% and 11%. Yale 19% and 9%. Tuition and fees are often 3rd or 4th down the list on the total operational revenues depending on the size of an institution's endowment or whether they own their med center. If you don't think revenue factors into what they care about, you are wrong. It's nice to have a reputation in both spheres, because they are complimentary, but better to be stronger in what is paying more of the bills.
There isn't research money in non-STEM graduate fields, and professional degrees, like law and business that you seem to be alluding to, aren't the same as category as research PhD programs. Total academic research expenditures (funded from any sources) in all combined NON-science & engineering fields (such as business, law, humanities, education, arts, etc) amounted to $3.6 billion in FY15, and of that, $1.1 billion was federally financed. In comparison, science and engineering academic R&D expenditures totaled $65.0 billion, $36.8 billion of which was federally financed. That should give you an idea of the priorities (i.e. what people care about) within both academic research institutions, not to mention the tax payers of the nation that are footing a large portion of the funding at both the national and local level. That isn't to say that is all they care about, but money follows interest.
True that "most people" aren't in academia, nor in academic research, and such things aren't therefore important to "most people" but I was talking about reputations within the academic world, in a true international sense, and what attracts faculty and research graduate students. Undergrad and liberal arts schools mean little or nothing in that sphere, which isn't to say they are unimportant in their own sphere of operations. What you are talking about by "most people" is the pop culture of US New rankings and such, and that is largely different. Wellesley, Swarthmore, Pomona...they aren't in the conversation within academia with Cal, Stanford, Michigan, Ivies, Duke, WashU, Chicago, MIT, Cal Tech....the latter are the schools with reputations competing domestically against each other and internationally with Oxford, Cambridge, ETH Zurich, etc, and those reputations are created by their cadre of research faculty and the research output of those faculty. Apples and oranges.
I have to agree with nzmorange.
Doesn't most of the revenue coming from government grants and private grants or contracts get spent on research (paying researchers, buying and maintaining equipment, maintaining work space, etc.)? If a medical school professor gets a grant from NIH to study a cure for pinkie wilt, and a matching grant from the American Pinkie Wilt Awareness Society (it's a herringbone pattern yellow and black ribbon, by the way), almost all of the money would go towards funding her salary and the salary and scholarships of her research assistants, the cost of the equipment used, and the purchase of goods and services used in the study. Only a little might go towards covering institutional overhead (medical school administration, campus police, the library, accounting, and the university administration as a whole). If successful there will be an intangible benefit to her university's brand from publicity and resulting increases in donations and applications. A few undergraduates might benefit from spending time with the researcher who cured pinkie wilt. But the direct cash stays in research.
Likewise, a men's basketball coach might generate some direct revenue by assembling a good team that fills the stands -- selling tickets, concessions and merchandise. If really successful, the team might win some NCAA Tournament shares, part of which would come back to the athletic department. Over time success would less directly result in higher media rights revenue. Oh, and shoe contracts. Most of that revenue will go to the costs of the team (coach salaries, scholarships, travel, etc.), with the remainder going to the rest of the athletic department. A little AD revenue might go towards covering institutional overhead (campus police, the library, accounting, and the university administration as a whole). If the AD is successful there will be an intangible benefit to the university's brand from publicity and resulting increases in donations and applications. A few undergraduates might benefit from spending time with a successful coach. But the direct cash stays in the athletic department.
So if you're the university's president you have to worry about funding colleges for liberal arts, law, business, education, divinity, etc. The direct cash for those doesn't come from research grants or athletics but from tuition, donations, endowment revenue and (if public) state appropriations. Success in research or athletics can indirectly improve those funding sources, but both research and athletics are arguably "off-budget" under normal circumstances.
So taking away the research component doesn't change much about the core of the school. Using schools I'm most familiar with, Emory is Duke without Division I athletics, Davidson is Duke without a medical school, a bunch of research labs and an FBS football team. None of the three have much in common at all with the University of Iowa or Penn State.
Actually indirects (or overhead as you might call them), that a university collects from federal and private research grants are around 50+% of the total grant. At UCSF, for instance, the current indirect rate for sponsored research is 58.5%. At Berkley, 57%, Duke, 59%, Michigan is 56%, Harvard 59%, Yale 67.5%. Each school negotiates that rate with the federal government, but usually doesn't cover the full university expense of housing and maintaining its research plant. The balance of those research grants after indirects is used for faculty salary support (to "buy" time away from faculty academic duties), lab personnel, supplies, or equipment. And all of that balance is held by the university...the university holds all the money, and all hires and purchases are done through the university. The institutions act as the gatekeepers (or guardians) so to speak that the money is being utilized for the purposes agreed to. And by the way, the equipment, instruments, or supplies that is purchased for research by these grants is property of the university, not the researcher.
Yeah, you have to find funding for everything that a university does, whether researching cancer or training the next great poets, but the major research universities...meaning like the top 200 or so you see in the international rankings, do more science and engineering research by $ than anything else...by far.
Research enterprises at a university are definitively not "off budget". And it is often the largest part of the university. The infrastructure and personnel to support the research portion of the university can be the largest portion of the university. At Pitt, for instance, there are 24.4K undergrads university wide including regional campuses, and another 8.3K graduate and professional students. 936 are MD or PhD students in the School of Medicine, or about 2.9% of all university students. However, 33.6% of all university employees (faculty, post-docs, and staff) are in the medical school. That's all research, and doesn't include Pitt's 5 other schools of the health sciences (Nursing, Dental, Public Health, Rehab, and Pharmacy which are all research heavy). Research is way bigger at Pitt, and other similar schools, than any other component, costs way more to support with staff and maintain facilities, and demands more investment to stay ahead of competitors and on the cutting edge of any field.
BTW, a large portion of endowments at these universities often are also designated to research. For instance, at universities with medical schools, endowing research funds or chairs in particular areas of health concern or disease are favorite targets of philanthropists. About half, probably a little less, of Pitt's endowment is focused on its medical school.
(This post was last modified: 07-10-2017 10:32 AM by CrazyPaco.)
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