The chart actually presents a lot of data over time. For the past 10 years, Chicago has always been around 40-50.
Is Chicago just different structurally than peers that seem similar, but are ranked higher? For instance, Yale and Duke are similar in size to Chicago, but they’re ~30 spots higher in the rankings. Chicago is actually closer to Princeton and Dartmouth for R&D expenditures. Why is that?
(One of the biggest movers in the top 10, actually, is UPenn. Penn went from #17 to the top five in just a year. Any idea on how that happened?)
What percent of R&D expenditures in this table come from R&D carried out at medical centers? This list seems to mirror research budgets of large medical centers. Could Chicago’s relatively small size in this respect explain the ranking?
Looking at this list, a couple of things caught my eye:
UT MD Anderson is listed #21 on the list, and its partner institution (UT Health Science Center @ Houston) is #92. MD Anderson is part of the UT system, but is independently operated. A large part of its operating budget comes from research programs – mostly funded by NIH and other government grants. Cancer funding is at an all time high
The other clue is at position #39: Baylor College of Medicine. BCM is an independent medical/graduate school that focuses on medical sciences. Although BCM does not have an undergraduate college, it is research powerhouse and receives lots of grant money for research.
So it appears that the NSF ranking is driven mainly by biomedical and scientific research. Schools with extensive research in social sciences, or other areas are not ranked as highly. An annual list is published that ranks institutions by NIH funding received. And it looks very similar to the NSF ranking: https://www.genengnews.com/lists/top-50-nih-funded-institutions-of-2018/
Ok, but this doesn’t account for the fact that the University runs three different, and high spending research institutions - a real figure would include spending from the Marine Biological Laboratory, Argonne, and Fermi. @Cue7
I wonder if the data should be scaled by SIZE of research staff at each institution, So, do very very large med schools like Johns Hopkins end up on top because of their size, so more faculty to win NSF grants? I think we need to scale the data by the number of faculty. U of Chicago is much much smaller than Penn, or even Johns Hopkins graduate schools.
Normalized by the number of research faculty, Chicago could be number 1 on this list, I bet. I have not done the math.
I am sure some Chicago grad will do that for me.
My sense–Chicago is the one of the PREMIER research school in CS, physics, economics and a few other disciplines. Don’t forget the Toyota Institute of CS at U of Chicago! Is their med school large?
Hopkins, I happen to know, has a 1000 student school of public health, very large medical school, large nursing school with PhDs offered, and then the PhDs in all the sciences and engineering, and more. Hopkins is small for undergrad and HUGE for grad school, so of course they land at number 1.
Does not mean its a better school though, its just bigger than Chicago.
UChicago has always had a big social science footprint, and I expect this ranking reflects that (to an extent).
The signature major here, for better or for worse, is economics. Most research in the discipline requires a STATA license, the right dataset, and an underpaid gofer to make the tables look nice. The physical and biological sciences departments are strong, with long lists of Nobel laureates, but I don’t think they dominate the school as they might at, say, MIT. That, combined with the size of the University, could explain this ranking.