“though UVa and Bama now also offer engineering.” @PurpleTitan , UVa has had engineering since 1836! http://www.seas.virginia.edu/about/history.php
Regarding IU and engineering:
"The Indiana Commission for Higher Education has unanimously approved the creation of a bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. in engineering through the School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University-Bloomington.
IU will offer the degrees in intelligent systems engineering beginning with the 2016-17 academic year."
That makes sense. I was thinking EE, ME etc. Indiana would unravel as a state
Sounds like UChicago’s Molecular Engineering major where they slap the word “engineering” on a niche field where they already have faculty doing research (in STEM research these days, the lines between traditional STEM fields are really blurred). Offering a program in a niche field isn’t the same as starting an engineering school, however. If they offer majors in MechE, EE, and Civil, then that will be news.
In addition to UVa’s engineering program being very old (4th), I was curious about Alabama since that was mentioned along with UVa. Alabama has the 5th oldest engineering school in the country. http://tradition.eng.ua.edu/ http://eng.ua.edu/about/
Virginia Tech and Auburn were established in 1872 as land grant colleges. Virginia has a few public schools that have engineering-VT, UVa, GMU, VCU, ODU. So, each state seems to do this their own way.
Sure, let’s just conveniently ignore the fact that Big Ten and PAC-12 colleges are bloated behemoths and ACC and Ivy League colleges tend towards medium-to-small in size.
On a per capita basis, the research dollars per student look like this:
Ivy League: $30,926
ACC: $17,162
PAC-12: $15,377
Big Ten: $14,213
@BobWallace,
What are you using as your denominator? Total students, undergrads only, or grad students only?
You realize that the vast majority of research is done by faculty and grad students, I hope.
So as a comparison,
Harvard has 4671 academic staff and 14500 grad students.
UMich has 6771 academic staff and 15230 grad students.
Northwestern has 3344 academic staff and 10759 grad students.
All numbers from Wikipedia.
I don’t know where @bclintonk got his research expenditure numbers, but I have the 2009 numbers, which are
Harvard: 462.2M
UMich: 1007.2M
Northwestern: 515.2M
On a per capita basis using faculty as the denominator,
Harvard: 98.95K
UMich: 145.75K
Northwestern: 154.07K
On a per capita basis using grad students as the denominator,
Harvard: 31.88K
UMich: 66.13K
Northwestern: 47.89K
I can do the same exercise for any ACC school you want as well.
As a faculty member who directs a lab doing about $30M of research per year, yes I am vaguely aware of that. 
On our campus there is actually a healthy amount of research being done by undergraduates. Nevertheless, faculty and grad students certainly dominate the totals, as you state.
I used total enrollment for the figures quoted previously, since I reasoned that they give a good measure of the scale of the university.
Dividing by graduate students instead is certainly another valid way to compare. It doesn’t change the order, but it does tighten up the distribution:
Ivy League: $59,886 per grad student
ACC: $57,197 per grad student
PAC-12: $55,559 per grad student
Big Ten: $54,604 per grad student
Research $$$ per FTE faculty would be another interesting comparison, but I have reached my limit for computations tonight.
@BobWallace, I don’t see how research expenditures per student is a meaningful measure of anything. Even if you exclude undergrads and count only grad students, it’s going to be skewed by how STEM-heavy any given school’s graduate programs are relative to the overall size of the school. Schools with a higher fractional share of their grad students in the humanities, social sciences, law, business, public policy, social work, divinity, etc. ,etc. will inevitably come out lower on such per-student measures, simply because most of the research dollars are in STEM fields. But you don’t need to use research expenditures per student (or per graduate student) as a proxy for how STEM-heavy a school is, because you can determine that directly simply by counting the number of students in various fields. So I don’t see how research expenditures per student tells us anything useful. And in any event, it’s the faculty who haul in the research dollars, not the grad students. Research expenditures per STEM faculty might be a more meaningful measure, but even that is going to be muddied up by the fact that not all STEM fields receive equal funding.
Just looking at pure research expenditures is a cleaner signal. It tells us where funded research is actually being done, without muddying up that signal with irrelevant information, such as how many non-STEM students (or graduate students) a school has relative to its overall research expenditures. It doesn’t tell us anything, at least directly, about the quality of the research, or the quality of the people doing the research, or its ultimate value to society. Nor does it tell us anything about the value of such research to students, graduate or undergrad. But there may be some correlation to its ex ante perceived value to society, because most of those research dollars are awarded in competitive processes. Of course, the grant-making agencies could be wrong. Only time will tell, but I assume an institution that consistently fails to produce anything of value would eventually see its external research grants diminish. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to work.
By the way, I was using 2011 data that appeared in a 2013 report. Here are somewhat more recent NCES data on university “research and development” expenditures reported by the National Science Foundation for FY 2013 ($000):
- Johns Hopkins $2,168, 568
- University of Michigan-Ann Arbor $1,375,117
- University of Washington $1,192,513
- University of Wisconsin-Madison $1,123,503
- UC San Diego $1,075,554
- UC San Francisco $1,042,841
- Harvard $1,012,766 [NOTE: this is up sharply from $777 mm in 2012, $650 mm in 2011, and $585 mm in 2010]
- Duke $992,821 [NOTE: this is down slightly from a peak of $1,022 mm in 2011]
- UNC Chapel Hill $973,007
- UCLA $966,659
- Stanford $945,450
- MIT $900,524
- Columbia $889,188
- Pitt $872,736
- Minnesota $858,378
- Cornell $845,184
- Penn State $827,880
- Penn $828,422 [NOTE: down from $886,036 in 2011]
- Texas A&M $820,015
- Ohio State $793.373
- Yale $788,784
- Illinois $743,487
- Georgia Tech $730,488
- UC Berkeley $727,002
- UC Davis $725,734
Note that the B1G has 6 of the top 25 (#2 Michigan, #4 Wisconsin, #15 Minnesota, #17 Penn State, #20 Ohio State, and #22 Illinois), including 2 of the top 4. The Ivy League has 5 of the top 25 (#7 Harvard, #13 Columbia, $16 Cornell. #18 Penn, and #21 Yale). The ACC has 4 of the top 25 (#8 Duke, #9 UNC Chapel Hill, #14 Pitt, and #23 Georgia Tech). And the PAC-12 has 4 of the top 25 (#3 Washington, #10 UCLA, #11 Stanford, and #24 UC Berkeley. And let’s do the other “power conferences,” shall we? The SEC has 1 of the top 25 (#19 Texas A&M), and the Big 12 has none.
You can see the rest of the table here:
https://ncsesdata.nsf.gov/profiles/site?method=rankingBySource&ds=herd
Of course not, since it doesn’t promote your “B1G Rules!” philosophy.
The Big Ten is an awesome collection of research universities, but the way this game works is that colleges hire faculty members who attract research dollars, and those faculty are paid out of university funds, not research dollars. Colleges create endowed chairs, lab facilities, and other goodies to attract the best possible researchers who can draw in the dollars.
The chairs, buildings, lab equipment, facilities, professors, and grad students are all the attractors of research dollars, and - funny thing - having huge numbers of all of these things makes a difference. (And let’s not even get started on the medical field, skewing the data and creating outliers like UCSF that no one on earth considers a notable undergrad college, or on dedicated defense labs like Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab.)
Only 5 Ivy League colleges in the top 25! Are they the 5 best or the 5 biggest? Yep, you guessed it, the 5 biggest.
But sure, anyone who wants to can believe that UC Davis is superior to Princeton, and pretend the difference in research dollars has nothing to do with size (35,000 vs. 7,900).
Using a measure that includes undergrads to determine size makes even less sense (with regards to research), though, since it is faculty who pull in research dollars. If you use total students, UCSF blows everyone away.
Personally, I think the denominator should be some count of faculty for any per capita measure. UC-Davis has a little over twice as much faculty as Princeton, BTW.
I think you’re attributing to me an argument that I never made. I never said research expenditures are a measure of the quality of undergraduate education, or of graduate education for that matter. Nor did I even claim that research expenditures are a marker of the quality of research being done; in fact, if you go back and read my previous posts, I think you’ll see that I explicitly said you can’t make that assumption. Nor do I promote a “B1G Rules!” philosophy. I posted some statistics on university research expenditures in response to a previous poster’s broad factual claims in this area because I was curious as to whether those factual claims were correct. They are–the B1G universities spend more on research than the Ivy League, the ACC schools, or the PAC-12 schools, and that high-volume research effort extends deep into the conference, to 12 of the 14 B1G schools, unlike the ACC and the PAC-12 where a high-volume research effort is confined to a smaller number of schools. That’s as far as my claims ever went. You’re the one who misconstrued that as a statement about the quality of education in the B1G. You really should read more carefully.
Yes, I know perfectly well how the game works. I also know that research universities are anxious to get their hands on all those research dollars not only out of a high-minded commitment to advancing the frontiers of knowledge–though there is that, and any research university worth its salt takes that seriously as a central part of its mission–but also because they can snag back a portion of the external research grants as “indirect cost recovery” and pay for the labs, buildings, equipment, facilities, operations and maintenance, libraries, student services, and administrative costs, as well as using some of the “direct” expenditures to support grad students, sometimes even undergrads, in funded research assistant positions. So all those labs, facilities, endowed chairs, etc., are strategic investments that they expect to be substantially or fully repaid over time through the research dollars the faculty are bringing into the university. You write as if research universities just sprang up accidentally and some of them happened to be larger than others and therefore were better positioned to win the lion’s share of the research dollars. No, it doesn’t work like that. Almost invariably they started out small; that’s certainly true in the B1G as these schools have been around for a very long time. They’ve built up their research capacity consciously and strategically. putting themselves in a position to compete effectively for research funding. Some are better at it than others.
Note also that the size of a university’s research capacity isn’t necessarily correlated with the size of its student body. Northwestern (15,000 students, grad + undergrad) is less than 1/3 the size of Michigan State (51,000), but Northwestern’s research budget is 25% bigger. Michigan (37,000) is smaller than 10 B1G schools, yet only Wisconsin is close to Michigan in research expenditures, and Michigan’s research budget is more than double the conference average. There is some connection, to be sure; bigger schools need more faculty, and the schools with the biggest research expenditures also have more faculty (and therefore presumably can support a larger student body if the school elects to go that route), but it doesn’t follow that a large faculty gives you a large research capacity. It takes much more than sheer numbers—it takes all the kinds of investments you talk about, plus it takes the right faculty, capable of doing the kinds of research that get funded and capable of competing for the research grants and willing to put forth a sustained effort at both. Indiana (46,000+ students) is one of the bigger schools in the B1G and it has a large faculty (2,166 FTE). but it ranks a distant last among B1G schools in research expenditures. Why? Well, it’s not a STEM-heavy school, and STEM is where the research dollars are. STEM-heavy Purdue has fewer students (<40,000) and only a slightly larger faculty (2,287) than Indiana, but Purdue pulls in more than 3 times as much in research expenditures.
Dismissing the B1G’s research capacity as a simple function of size is a canard. If size was all it took, then the biggest research expenditures would be at Arizona State, Central Florida, Ohio State, Maryland, Minnesota, Florida International, Florida, Texas, and Texas A&M, in that order. In fact, according to the NSF, those schools rank #53, #135, #20, #41, #15, #134, #27, #31, and #19, respectively.
Candidly, if you’re looking for an Ivy Lite, you’d start with the prototypical “chance me” list and just remove the actual Ivies. Stanford, Vanderbuilt, Chicago, etc.
More useful, I think, maybe to go back to the old “Public Ivies” lists. I think I remember Vermont, William and Mary, U Mich, UIUC, Miami, and a couple in California. I’m certain there were others. Anyway, that would be a good place to start. Ought to mollify some of the thread contributors, as it validates at least part of the league whose name must not be spoken.
@50N40W, as I mentioned before, a distinction really has to be made between undergraduate education, graduate education, and faculty.
When it comes to undergraduate education, most people would say that most of the publics in the B10, while there are many fine schools there, don’t approximate an Ivy/equivalent atmosphere close enough to even be considered Ivy-lite outside of specific schools/departments that are among the tops nationally in their field (such as CS at UIUC or music at IU, etc.).
When you talk about graduate education and faculty, however, the B10/CIC features many research powerhouses and is only slightly behind the middle of the Ivy League as a group.
@PurpleTitan that seems about right.
True - in fact it’s a canard you made up!
I called the Big Ten “awesome research universities”, but even that is not cheerleader enough to satisfy your “B1G RULES!!!” agenda. Nope, plainly dismissive.
My argument was that size matters, and it does. But quality certainly matters too, in fact it matters very much, which is why I outlined some quality factors that are important. There are other factors I mentioned that matter as well that are highly extraneous to mainstream university functions, such as presence of med school and/or dedicated defense labs like APL. Big Ten universities by and large have quality and size, which is what makes them awesome, whereas many Ivy and ACC colleges (for example) have quality but not size.
Not all colleges are determined to grow by leaps and bounds to become as colossal as Big Ten and PAC-12 colleges tend to be. If Princeton cared to do so it easily could, but that is not what they happen to value. There’s nothing inherently wrong with being gigantic, BTW, although unfortunately it does seem to inspire gigantic perhaps unwarranted ego boosts for some folks.
twoinanddone,
Everybody knows Northwestern is no Michigan/Wisconsin/Ohio State; you are not adding anything insightful. That doesn’t make Northwestern anything like JHU whose athletics is a joke compared to Northwestern. There’s a big gap between D1 and D3. Just because NU doesn’t consistently produce D1 champ doesn’t make it “more like JHU or a lot of D3 schools”. NU teams have been playing competitively in tennis, swimming, softball, wrestling, etc. In football, NU hasn’t been among the worst three teams within the BIG in the past two decades. Schools like Indiana, Maryland, Nebraska, Purdue, Illinois are also no Michigan/Wisconsin. There’s no reason to single out Northwestern. You need to stop being ridiculous.
NW is more like Hopkins as a SCHOOL. Private, very good in the areas the school chooses to concentrate in, very selective. NW is the only private school in the B1G 10 (except Hopkins). Size, selectivity, not a flagship. Original question was about academics, even though the OP selected to compare schools academically through their athletic conferences.
@twoinanddone, by your logic, Stanford, Duke, and the Ivies are like a lot of D3 schools as well, then (OK, the Ivies arguably are).
It depends on what you are comparing. The OP was comparing the academics of the Ivies to the B1G 10. The question was is the Big 10 ‘Ivy Lite?’ If you compare the sport of the Ivies to the sports of Stanford and Duke, then S and D are not very similar to the Ivies in most sports, in recruiting rules, in scholarships, but if you compare the academics, they are much closer and maybe closer to the Ivies than other schools in their sports conferences. Is Stanford more like Harvard or more like Utah? In what? Athletics or scholarship? Size, admissions, cost, types of FA offered, students applying to both? If you compare football teams, the answer is Utah. If you compare academics?
If we were on Sesame Street singing ‘One of these things is not like the others’ and lining up Big 10 schools, wouldn’t most people pick NW as being the least like Ohio State, UW, UMich, Minn, Illinois, Iowa? Aren’t all the others flagships, public, HUGE? Aren’t Maryland and Rutgers more like Iowa and Minn than NW as universities?