US University Total R&D Funding Listing from Bestcolleges.com in 2015
We show where UC Irvine stands relevant to highly funded American Universities, and what level it will have as a future goal.
Most of the funding is federal and in engineering and the sciences. In John Hopkins and UCSD it is medical. Since many students are going into social sciences, the arts, and humanities, the funding in STEM subjects does not reflect on the qualities of the Universities in these fields which are most important to those students.
Obviously, the exact ranking or exact amount is not relevant, since all of the funding goes to valuable R&D for improving our knowledge, often in areas that are important to our human condition. This is just a way to list the Universities, and make some broad comparisons. We list through 20, and then add two more California universities.
| Rank | University | R&D in billions of dollars |
| 1 | John Hopkins | 2.11 |
| 2 | U. Michigan | 1.32 |
| 3 | U. Wisconsin | 1.17 |
| 4 | U. Washington | 1.11 |
| 5 | UC San Diego | 1.07 |
| 6 | UC San Francisco | 1.03 |
| 7 | Duke U. | 1.01 |
| 8 | UCLA | 1.00 |
| 9 | Stanford | 0.90 |
| 10 | Columbia U. | 0.89 |
| 11 | U. North Carolina | 0.88 |
| 12 | U. Pittsburgh | 0.88 |
| 13 | U. Pennsylvania | 0.85 |
| 14 | U. Minnesota | 0.83 |
| 15 | MIT | 0.82 |
| 16 | Cornell | 0.80 |
| 17 | Harvard | 0.80 |
| 18 | Penn State | 0.80 |
| 19 | Ohio State | 0.77 |
| 20 | UC Berkeley | 0.73 |
| 21 | UC Davis | 0.71 |
| 30 | USC | 0.62 |
John Hopkins is well known to be on the top. After that is the large U. of Michigan with 6,600 academic staff. What is amazing is the large grouping around $1 billion, then around $0.9 billion, and then around $0.8 billion. Is there an equalization established by federal funding agencies or Congress, or is it a statistical average of similar size universities with excellent faculty and hundreds of grants from many agencies adding up to similar totals. In either case, the exact totals don’t really mean much other than these are universities where graduate students and undergraduates will be exposed to important research and researchers or developers in many fields.
UC Irvine in 2012 had R&D funding in 2012 of $0.35 billion. We are a young 50 year old campus, and still have a large way to grow. We still have a lot of areas to grow institutes in. We are at one third the R&D funding of the leading UC campuses of UCSD and UCLA, and of Stanford, and at a half of UC Berkeley and UC Davis. We have about 1,100 faculty. So for a young campus that has had much of its growth recently, we are doing well. And it also shows us what levels to strive for in the future.
