Bottom
Line
26: Years Johns Hopkins University has ranked first
in science, medical, and engineering research spending,
according to the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The new rankings compared the bottom lines of hundreds of
American colleges and universities for fiscal year 2004.
Johns Hopkins spent $1.375 billion — 43.8 percent
more than second-place finisher University of California,
Los Angeles, and 44.1 percent more than third-place
finisher University of Michigan. Hopkins was also the
biggest spender — dropping $1.229 billion — for
research partially supported by federal agencies like the
National Institutes of Health and the Department of
Defense.
Though Hopkins is at the top of the list, the NSF reports
that, overall, national spending on science research is
slowing. In 2002 and 2003, nationwide science research
expenditures grew by more than 10 percent. But the $42.9
billion spent in 2004 was only 7.2 percent more than in
2003, and when adjusted for inflation, only 4.7 percent
more.
Hopkins has topped the NSF ranking since 1979, when it
started including money spent on research done by the
Applied Physics Laboratory. (APL accounted for $670
million, or 49 percent, of this year's figure.) Hopkins
reached another milestone in 2002, when it became the first
school to spend over a billion dollars — $1.14
billion, to be exact — in total research, and is
still the only school to have crossed that benchmark.
"Discoveries and innovations that provide lasting benefit
to humanity are the ultimate goals of the scientific,
medical, and engineering research done at Johns Hopkins,"
said university President William R. Brody. "But we are
also gratified that our scientists' success in winning
support for their research has a major economic benefit at
home here in Maryland, where the university is one of the
state's largest private employers."
—Virginia Hughes, A&S '06 (MA)