Catherwood LibraryILR School

Some of today’s cutting edge research occurs in public universities such as Ohio State University’s Spine Research Institute, where motion sensors in a $750,000 lab track a volunteer’s skeleton and muscles as he bends and stretches in order to study back pain, which affects 8 out of 10 Americans, accounts for 100 million annual lost workdays in the U.S., and has accelerated opiate addiction. But federal and state funding towards research universities has steadily decreased against the pace of inflation since 2008, and the Trump administration’s proposal to cut the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars will affect all research universities even further. The impact will be most significant in public universities such as Ohio State and the University of Missouri, Midwestern universities where historically some of the nation’s most important research has been conducted. These universities have appreciable impact in diversifying their local economies, which had traditionally relied on manufacturing and agriculture, and serve as one of the most important institutions in towns such as Columbus, Ohio, and Columbia, Missouri. Private universities can turn to their endowments and private donations to offset budget cuts from the public sector, but public colleges lack the financial resources to survive long-term beyond government funding. The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion. Threats to pensions in Illinois and tenure in Wisconsin threaten an exodus of faculty and their research funding, resulting in increased regional inequality, as brainpower, talent, and jobs leave the Midwest and the Rust Belt towards the coasts and global competitors. While local Midwestern economies will feel the impact first, a decrease in the ability to conduct science and engineering research will lead to a decrease in innovation, and the U.S., traditionally a global leader in science and technology, is now ninth among the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in terms of gross domestic product spent on research.