Industry funding for academic research increased in 2005 after a three-year decline, according to data compiled by the National Science Foundation.

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Ryan Noon

Courtesy the Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported last week that industry funding reached a record high of $2.3 billion in 2005, a 7.7 percent increase over the previous year.

Despite this increase, industry funding covers only five percent of academic research. Federal funding — which provided $29.2 billion in 2005 — is the primary source of support. State and local governments and institutions also provide significant sources of funding for academic research.

Stanford received the third highest amount of federal academic funding in 2005, with a total of $574,675,000. Only Johns Hopkins University (just under $1.3 billion) and the University of Washington (just over $600 million) received more money.

Though industry funding makes up only a small percentage of funding on the national scale, Chemical Engineering Asst. Prof. Charles Musgrave said industry support is stronger at Stanford than at most other universities. Musgrave attributed this to the University’s tradition of helping students and alumni start companies, such as Google and Sun Microsystems.

“Industry support is not typically strong,” he said. “Stanford is one of the most fortunate universities in the level of industry funding we do get.”

Musgrave noted the intense competition for funding, especially over the past decade, as science departments have grown and more schools have developed programs and entered the funding scramble.

“There is more and more faculty fighting for a research funding pie that is either not growing or not growing fast enough,” he said.

He said that Stanford’s industry funding increase is partly due to motivated faculty looking for new alternatives to finance their research.

“One related issue is how the University is affected by having faculty spend more and more time hunting for research money,” Musgrave said. “It is either do it or don’t survive, but faculty are too distracted from classes, students and maybe even their research to write research proposals.”

Contact Allison Dedrick at adedrick@stanford.edu.