Accountability Report
Appendices
Since 1991, the UW has ranked second in the nation among all universities, public and private, and first among public universities, in grant and contract support from federal agencies. Excellence throughout the institution is necessary to generate such standing; the amount for FY96 is $482 million for the year. In addition, from the private sector, the UW ranks third in the nation in research support from industry and fifth in licensing income from commercialization of research. MIT is the only other American university to rank among the top ten in all three of these categories.
The UW is the state's second largest employer. When one realizes the extent to which local communities and the state government must go to provide incentives for new jobs in this state, it is directly relevant to measure the resources invested in this state as a result of the intellectual efforts of people employed at the UW conducting highly valued work.
The state provides almost no direct funding for scholarship, research and creative contributions, except the salaries of those faculty on General Fund state lines. Less than 15% of regular faculty in the School of Medicine, School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences are on state lines, so their salaries are almost entirely dependent on external support. Even for faculty in Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and other parts of the University, it is common to offset parts of salaries in order to generate sufficient time to conduct research. In all cases, the direct costs of materials, staff, and equipment must be financed externally. As a measure of accountability we are now in a better position to quantify the impact of those grant and contract dollars. For FY 1996 we estimate that grant and contract dollars supported jobs for 1,300 FTE faculty, 2,350 FTE staff, and 1,600 FTE students. An additional $6.4 million directly supported student fellowships and traineeships.
Our goal is to maintain external funding in face of competition from other leading institutions. We anticipate that even more sophisticated measures can be developed. For example, a measure should adjust dollar objectives for inflation (to the extent matched by increases in State funding, the base upon which all external competitive funding is built) and for percent changes in the federal agency budgets (weighted according to proportion of UW funds by agency). We urge the proposed Advisory Board on Accountability to seek additional tools for measuring the impact of Grants and Contracts revenues.
Accountability Report
Appendices
