Dan Greenberg’s latest piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Money quote:
Some striking contrasts of wealth and stinginess are evident in the data on endowments and official statistics on research compiled by the National Science Foundation. The richest universities spend a great deal of other people’s money on research, but only minuscule amounts of their own funds.
For example, in the 2004 fiscal year, Harvard and Yale Universities had the two biggest endowments, respectively. According to the NSF’s calculations, Harvard spent none of its own money on R&D, but $399-million from federal funds; it had an endowment of $25.4-billion and received $589-million in gifts. Although Yale spent $26.1-million from its coffers on R&D, it also spent $330-million from the government; its endowment was $15.2-billion, and it took in $285-million in gifts. Other pre-eminent research universities followed the same pattern. Institutions do spend money on infrastructure for research, like new labs, but those funds make up only a tiny fraction of the budgets of rich universities.
Discoverers and Discoveries 