N.C. State is increasingly relying on private funding for research due to the state government budget cuts and the federal sequester, as the Technician reported last week. Whether we should accept more financial resources from private institutions has stirred a debate. As a traditional public university, the federal or state government fund more than 75 percent of research. No wonder the plummet of the public funding and the invasion of private money are worrisome to some people.
In fact, funding part of the research projects in public universities with private money is nothing new, even at N.C. State. The partnership between the SAS Institute and N.C. State’s Department of Statistics has long been well-known around the nation.
SAS Institute is not the only company that is engaging in cooperation with the statistics department. Montserrat Fuentes, the statistics department head, said there are 14 active Graduate Industrial Trainee programs (GITs) in the department and nine companies are currently supporting GITs financially, such as GlaxoSmithKline and BD Technologies.
“Our department has had a long tradition of partnership with corporations since the day it was founded,” Fuentes said. “The funding that comes from corporation accounts for slightly less than 50 percent in last year’s budget.”
The bond between the SAS Institute and N.C. State lends a tremendous amount of financial support to the Statistic Department. The department uses these resources to reward researchers, fund competitive projects and students and add necessary high-tech equipment. For years, these interactions between the two parties have made N.C. State’s statistics department one of greatest in the nation, in line with Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill’s counterparts.
The academic achievement of the statistic department comes less likely without the contribution of SAS. Why does the SAS Institute help the statistics department be successful? The core idea is that sufficient funding from SAS gives enough incentives to researchers and students to climb to the top of the field. Given the stable funding, researchers and students have no concern about the financial issues. It enables the department to recruit the most brilliant and qualified graduate students around the world, even if students are not able to pay the out-of-states tuition, whereas other departments without support are less likely to fund out-of-state students.
Some might argue that the government provides more stable financial resources to public colleges. True. But the most important thing that separates private funding from public funding is that private funding is always sensitive to market signals and steers research to the right directions, whereas government is usually slower than the companies to find out market signals. The main motive of companies is to look for investments that give them the highest return. Driven by this nature, private funding is usually used more efficiently and effectively.
Furthermore, the line between public universities and private colleges has become blurred when it comes to source of research funding. Research intensive public and private universities increasingly have far more similarities than differences in mission, structure and even financial resources. The federal government, despite tensions, remains an indispensable partner of research projects to universities. According to a study conducted by former President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Charles Vest, two-thirds of every dollar spent on the MIT campus in the 1960s came from the federal government, primarily from sponsored researched. In 2004, only 36 percent of our campus operating budget came from sponsored research, of which about 60 percent was from the federal government. This partnership between government and universities has become a norm in today’s research work.
In the foreseeable future, corporate funding for public colleges will not take over public money as the major financial resource. On one hand, it’s the state’s constitutional obligation to keep public universities in operations, with most liberal arts programs needed to be funded by taxpayers’ money. On the other hand, corporate funding is more likely to go to areas associated with industries, such as engineering, statistics and sciences in which N.C. State has strengths.
If many private universities are accepting public funding to the research, there is no need to worry about the role that private funding plays in colleges. Both history and school performance show that diverse schools, both private and public and their interactions have made higher education in the United States stand out from the rest of the world.
