UF center’s 2nd annual rankings show public universities on the rise

August 20, 2001

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Although the nation’s best private universities still dominate, public universities increasingly beat their private counterparts at attracting federal research dollars over the past decade.

That’s one conclusion of an annual study on the nation’s top research universities released this week by a University of Florida research center. The study, which ranks universities based on nine key indicators, is the second to be released by The Center for Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, also known as TheCenter.

“One of the things we discuss in the report’s analytical section is that below the very top level, more public universities can compete than private universities for the scarce resources that make universities great,” said John Lombardi, director of the center and former UF president. “That’s an increasing trend and an important one.”

Lombardi and Diane Craig, a research analyst at the center and a co-author of the study, said it has been significantly expanded this year as a result of requests from its target audience of faculty and administrators charged with improving public and private universities. Lombardi said the report contains a great deal of data presented in a way that allows universities to compare one another on equal terms.

“Our goal is to provide universities who are serious about measuring performance and improving over time with the tools to do that,” he said.

In addition to ranking private and public universities separately, this year’s study combines the two in a ranked list of the top American research universities. The study expands the rankings from the top 25 to the top 50 while also providing data on all universities with more than $20 million in federal research – the center’s minimum requirement for inclusion in the rankings. The center’s Web site (http://thecenter.ufl.edu) offers a downloadable data set of more than 600 institutions.

Contrasting popular annual college rankings, which order universities from best to worst, the study classifies universities by the number of indicators for which each ranks in the top 25 or 26-50. Among the top 25, the first group consists of universities that rank in the top 25 for all nine indicators. The second group includes those with only eight indicators, and so forth. The process is the same for the top 26-50.

The indicators are: total and federally sponsored research and development expenditures, number of faculty in The National Academies, number of significant faculty awards, number of doctoral degrees awarded, number of postdoctoral appointments, median SAT scores, endowment size, and amount of annual private contributions.

The indicators are the same as in last year’s study and are compared without weighting one more important than another. Popular rankings rely on weighting and formulas revised annually, Lombardi said. “We want institutions to have a clear understanding of their relative performance so they can use the data for their own calculations,” he said.

As a result, the study’s rankings do not differ much from last year. That mirrors reality, because the quality of individual universities does not fluctuate enough to justify much movement up or down in a single year, Lombardi said.

In the new ranking of America’s top research universities, universities with all nine measures in the top 25 are Cornell, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania – all private institutions. Three public universities make the list of universities with eight measures in the top 25: the universities of California Berkeley, Michigan and Minnesota. With three indicators in the top 25, the University of Florida is in the seventh tier of top research universities. Among publics, however, it is in the top tier, along with the University of California Berkeley, the University of California Los Angeles, the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Lombardi said the study reveals several interesting trends among American universities, including that, excepting the top level, public universities increasingly attract more federal research dollars than privates. A total of 106 universities have $20 million or more annually in federal expenditures, an achievement matched by only 48 private universities, he said.

Other authors of the study are Elizabeth Capaldi, provost of the State University of New York at Buffalo, Denise Gater, associate director of institutional research at UF, and Sarah Mendonça, a recent UF doctoral graduate and a research associate at TheCenter.