Research has become big business and a growing source of revenue, especially in recent decades. Yet it remains true that research and its follow-on activities, patenting and licensing, are the domain of a small fraction of the higher education industry. For-profit schools do not engage in research and, indeed, are not even eligible for federal grants from National Institutes of Health (NIH) or the National Science Foundation (NSF). Community colleges do not engage in significant amounts of scientific research of the sort that generates grants from government or corporations, nor do liberal arts colleges, including the most prestigious. Even many schools classified as research universities receive, for the most part, relatively inconsequential amounts of research grants. Only the elite public and private universities are involved in “big” research.

RESEARCH AND RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES

Research has been a substantial growth sector, as we can see from Figure 8.1. Following a period of quiescence from the late 1960s through the 1970s, the rate of growth of university spending on research and development (R&D) quickened in the 1980s (and not by accident, as we shall see below), increasing again in the second half of the 1980s. Over the entire period beginning in 1953, research spending grew from $817 million to an estimated $42.8 billion in 2006, more than a 50-fold increase in constant dollars. As a share of total higher education expenditures, R&D expenditures have increased substantially, from 9 percent in 1971 to 15 percent in 2006.