More 'Bang' for the Research Bucks

Some of the results from a recent Commerce Department meeting with university officials, it seems likely that research campuses will be doing a lot of planning soon, if they are not already, around improving the institution's long tail revenue growth and economic impact resulting from commercial applications of campus-based research. And work also needs to be done on ways of measuring more than just revenue dollars as a gauge of the impact of research. From Goldie Blumenstyk at The Chronicle of Higher Education:

"We're probably not maximizing the output," said Lee T. Todd Jr, president of the University of Kentucky. (He noted that Kentucky is now using a grant to pay two employees to work as "harvesters" of new invention ideas by scouring university labs for ideas that might have commercial potential.)

Mr. Todd and others said it was also important to develop new ways of measuring the effectiveness of commercialization, to include factors like how many new jobs are created and how much investment do the ideas draw. "They're trackable," he said. Organizations like the Association of University Technology Managers track gauges like patents awarded and licenses issued, but don't go so far as to try to assess job creation. A number of other organizations have recently begun to look at those broader approaches.

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Regional SCUP Events! Enjoy the F2F company of your colleagues and peers at one of three SCUP regional conferences this spring:

• March 14–16: Baltimore, MD
• March 24–26: Cambridge, MA
• April 5–7, San Diego, CA

Do Universities Generate Agglomeration Spillovers? Evidence from Endowment Value Shocks

This research is quite a different model than we usually see, but it's of interest:

We find modest but statistically significant spillover effects of university activity. The estimates indicate that a 10% increase in higher education spending increases local non-education sector labor income by about 0.5%. As the implied elasticity is no larger than what previous work finds for agglomeration spillovers arising from local economic activity in general, university activity does not appear to make a place any more productive than other forms of economic activity. We do find, however, that the magnitude of the spillover is significantly larger for firms that are technologically closer to universities in terms of citing patents generated by universities in their own patents and sharing a labor market with higher education.

New Study: University of Maryland Adds $3.4B to State Economy

A new, 39-page report from the University of Maryland College Park Foundation, Inc., titled "Impacts of the University of Maryland College Park," finds that for every dollar of taxpayer money the state provides to the university, more than $8 of economy benefit is created.

We have a link to the full report in the SCUP Links blog:
http://www.foundation.umd.edu/foundation/images/stories/sagereport.pdf

Career Colleges Release First-Ever Economic-Impact Study

From The Chronicle of Higher Education by Goldie Blumenstyk.

The report says the colleges, which often boast that they are the "tax-paying sector" of higher education, pay about $82-million a year in local and federal taxes. The report's authors say the figure underestimates the actual amount of taxes paid because it was calculated based on a figure for the overall fraction of revenues that all education entities pay in taxes, and most pay little or no taxes.

The study suggests that the overall economic impact of the for-profit sector approaches $39-billion, taking into account the $14.6-billion in revenue going to the colleges and the additional $4-billion that students spend beyond tuition to attend, along with the indirect impact of the higher wages earned by career-college graduates and the added value they bring to the industries where they go to work.

Complimentary copies of the report, which does not appear to be available on the Web yet, are available from Kerry Turner - kerryt@career.org - at the Imagine America Foundation.