Projects could be delayed or abandoned, fewer will advance to market and students will be discouraged from pursuing research and graduate education.īreakthroughs do not come overnight: They require stable funding and years-sometimes decades-of effort. The potential implications of reduced federal research funding are considerable. And industry funding sometimes comes with constraints that do not support long-term basic research. While there has been some growth in other funding (from 7 percent of our research funding in 1981 to 16 percent today), this slow pace means it can never replace federal funding. Completely replacing federal investment is almost impossible, as it would require Stanford to double its endowment and dedicate more than half the income to research. Such cuts would also come as many countries are investing more heavily in research and higher education and would exacerbate a flattening in federal research investments over the past five years.įrom 2004 to 2009, the government's share of total investment in university research in science and engineering dropped 4 percent, as universities turned increasingly to institutional and industry support. But such cuts would have significant implications for higher education and the country's ability to compete.
But the agreement also temporarily forestalled sequestration, or automatic spending cuts, including an 8 percent cut to federal agencies funding research.Īs of this writing, the outcome remains unresolved.
When President Obama signed the American Taxpayer Relief Act on January 2, discussion focused on raising revenues. In recent months, there has been much debate over the federal debt. For example, the original Google search algorithm was partly funded by a National Science Foundation research project. Many companies founded by Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs had their roots directly, or indirectly, in University research. A 2011 study of alumni and faculty estimated Stanford entrepreneurs generate $2.7 trillion in annual world revenues and created 5.4 million jobs since the 1930s. Given innovations at Stanford and the University of California-Berkeley, the emergence of Silicon Valley was no accident. More than half of academic research funding in the United States comes from the federal government, and the national return on that investment is considerable.Īcademic research contributes to an estimated 80 percent of our leading industries.
0 kommentar(er)
