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CCHE Quality Indicator System (QIS)
CU-Boulder Fall 1999 Submission
For funding 2000-01

Indicator 9: Research Productivity

This is an institutionally-specified measure. CU-Boulder received 75 of a possible 75 points on this measure.

With $139,000 in federal science and engineering research and development expenditures per tenured and tenure-track faculty member, CU-Boulder is second in the nation among the 17 public research universities with comparable data available. We trail only the University of California at San Diego on this measure, leading such well-known research universities as Michigan, California-Berkeley, and Wisconsin.

Our standing demonstrates the high research productivity of our faculty.

About 90% of the total externally funded research activity at CU-Boulder is federally funded research and development in science and engineering. State government and industry also fund some research. The environmental sciences account for about 45% of CU-Boulder federal research expenditures; physical sciences 22%, engineering 12%, and life sciences 12%.

Table 1, below, shows results for the 17 public research universities for which comparable data are available. For data sources and calculations see Table 2.

Table 1. Federal science & engineering research and development expenditures, FY9798, per tenured/tenure-track faculty member (in 1000's)

Comment: We are extremely pleased to demonstrate such high research productivity. Our research activity furthers CU-Boulder's mission of learning, enriches our teaching, and contributes to shared knowledge on a global level. There is economic benefit to Colorado in addition, including jobs -- over 6,000, based on a U.S. Commerce Department Bureau of Economic Analysis multipler for the "college, universities, and professional schools" sector in Colorado.

Table 2. Details, federal science and engineering research and development expenditures, FY9798, per tenured/tenure-track faculty member (in 1000's)

Data sources: Research and development expenditures are reported by universities to the National Science Foundation annually. These data are collected by the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium (HEDS), in cooperation with the Association of American Universities Data Exchange (AAUDE). Expenditure data are all from HEDS Report 99-7, August 9, 1999, for fiscal year 1997-98.

All public members of the AAU listed in the HEDS report are listed here except Pittsburgh and Rutgers, which requested that their figures not be used in comparisons between schools with and without medical schools.

Note that research expenditures, rather than research funding, are often used for comparisons over time and over institutions because many funding awards are multi-year.

The jobs multiplier cited above is from an October 1, 1999 memorandum by the Association of American Universities "Employment Impacts of Academic R&D, Fiscal Year 1997."

Column 2 of Table 2 shows total federal dollars (in thousands) for current fund expenditures for separately budgeted research and development in science and engineering (report item 1, page 19). Because these federal dollars include money that goes to medical schools, and not all universities in the list have medical schools, it was necessary to subtract federal medical dollars, listed in column 3, from the total federal dollars in column 2. (Medical expenditures from report item 2, page 29.) Adjusted data are reported in column 4.

The number of full-time tenured and tenure track faculty (column 5) is from the IPEDS faculty salary survey for 1997-98, as reported by the American Association of University Professors and the American Association of Universities data exchange. Only ranks of "professor," "associate professor," and "assistant professor" are used. These data do not include medical school faculty.

Caveats and cautions

Correspondents at other AAU institutions offer several cautions on comparability.

First, some institutions, especially land-grant, have many faculty in agricultural experiment stations who are expected to do research but whose funding comes almost entirely from state rather than federal sources. These faculty are included in the numbers above.

Second, medical faculty at some universities are credited for all federal research dollars when they may have only co-investigator status with a faculty member from a non-medical college within their university.

Third, the NSF/HEDS data allowed us to identify research expenditures in areas related to medicine, which may not always occur in a medical school. For example, CU-Boulder has no medical school but had some expenditures labeled "medical" (a small amount).

Finally, institutions vary in the definitions used for reporting faculty to IPEDS.

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Last revision 07/12/02