B1G Expansion Dollars: The Research Edition

And that does make a lot of sense. When it came out that the B1G said "no" to a school I thought for sure it was Louisville. Sure, better athletic program, but terrible academics. This diary goes about the cash adn motivation for why the B1G is only interested in premier academic members.

Your pictures aren't loading for me though, did you upload them to the internet and then link them here?

This is probably the most interesting diary I've read in... months? Absolutely fantastic work, MosherJordan. I think what you're saying makes a lot of sense, certainly more than the TV market explanation makes.

This is the best post I have ever read on this site, thanks.

thanks for the informative post!

"I list Nebraska and Syracuse as they are schools that only recently lost AAU membership, and may very well regain it. I also list Florida State since it is a school that has potential to obtain it, and is located in a congressionally rich state."

Nebraska was booted out of the AAU because they were WAY below the average, in various metrics the Association uses to determine fitness for membership. They were pretty close to the bottom, and in fact, were below quite a few schools that are not members.

Syracuse realized that they were likely to be booted. Rather than put themselves through an embarrassing vote, they elected to resign. Florida State's metrics are somewhat comparable to those of Nebraska and Syracuse, or perhaps a bit below.

Unless the AAU changes its standards, those schools would have a looooong way to go, before they'd be candidates for membership. Bear in mind that the existing members aren't standing still, and plenty of others trying to get in. To become an AAU members, it's not enough for a school like FSU to improve. They have to improve at a faster rate than their competitors, and that's hard to do.

It's a great theory, but Nebraska just doesn't fit. Maybe if the Presidents were listening to football people when Nebraska joined, and that got the attention of people that didn't think Nebraska was a fit...and then, academic advocates set their university presidents straight, then maybe this would explain what's gonig on now, but that's quite a stretch.

It's insight and thoughtful commentary like the above that has me tirelessly hitting F5 on my web browser. I believe that you have addressed and rationalized a key motive for BIG expansion that does not get much focus. Well done, unless you are really Jim Delaney in disguise...

Given the latest rumors about membership offers on the table to North Carolina and possibly Virginia/Georgia Tech, this is extremely timely.

Which leads me to one of two conclusions, either (1) you shared this with Jim Delany a short time ago or (2) you are Delany himself?!?!?

I've been saying this for a while and you hit the nail on the head wrt political influence on research spending. I work in the space industry and in all honesty, mikulski has been the sole reason umd and jhu have gotten such a huge chunk of space funding... umd's space program wouldn't exist without sen babs. Jhu's apl is essentially an ffrdc while maintaining univ status. If b1g were to get unc and uva, I would imagine wallops and goddard affiliated schools (re: umd and uva) would get money at the expense of marshall in huntsville and stennis in mississippi. Cic memberswith strong space programs like umich, penn st, and purdue will probably get the windfall in terms of increased funding to their state space grant consortiums by partnering with umd and uva.

And oh yeah, basketball and lacrosse would be pretty good too.

Great, great work...  It really brings into focus the mysterious, blurry world of the B1G's logic.  At least now I know there might actually be some, even though I might disagree with it to some degree.  We always hear phrases tossed around like "academic fit" and "research university" regarding expansion, but only a handful people understand that like you clearly do.  Well done, sir.  Well done.

It would be interesting to know if this influence is supposed to arrise naturally or if marching orders are given from the top.  I wish I knew professors from Rutgers and Maryland to ask if they get any instruction about being CIC members.

Does it perhaps make a little more sense to divide funds apportioned to a given state for research on some kind of merit basis? The way you have it is that Pitt doesn't add anything because we have PSU, right? But presumably PSU and Pitt split that money along some lines. It also seems to indicate that if we took Duke we'd be less likely to take UNC? Anyway, if I had to guess, the total is more or less determined by research status but the marginal dollar goes to the more politically connected district of the two.

Do I have that right and would altering your formula along those lines change much?

Unlike most posts/threads I feel smarter after reading this. This was a pretty eye opening read...and makes Rutgers/Maryland moves make more sense. Always follow the money!

I'm surprised this hasn't got a thread but last night a 247 reporter who said Maryland got an invite before it was officially announced, stated North Carolina has one on the table right now.  Many are thinking this is legit because the leak isfrom the reported who got the first scoup.

Then Virginia and Georgia Tech are being discussed for #16.

So MJ was right on the money in his article.

I guess we'll see if its true soon enough...

MosherJordan, I appreciate the time you took to look into this data, but I honestly think it's way off base.  Basically, I think you're seeing correlation, and then making some (mostly incorrect) inferrences about how the allocation process works to claim causation.  I don't mean any disrespect by this, but do you have any invovlement in the federal research allocations process where you might have seen the type of lobying you describe to influence allocations to other CIC schools?  Again, I don't mean any disrespect, but I assume not since you said things about NAS being a funding organization (which it is not).

So, to give some context, I am an engineering professor at a top 5 university in the US.  I get federal research funds from several federal agencies (NSF, NIH, DoD), and I sit on review panels at these same types of agencies.  I am not at an institution in the CIC, but I was a student at UM and am very close to faculty at several CIC schools.  If anyone wants information about how federal research dollars are allocated, I'm happy to answer to the best of my ability.

There is definitely political influence in some types of federal research allocations (e.g., grants to establish large centers, some grants to associated research centers such as JPL APL that someone mentioned above).  But, while big numbers individually, these types of allocations are small compared to the litany of reguar grants given to professors (individuals or small teams).  For NSF/NIH types of grants, the merit review is taken very seriously and the notion that the conference affiliation of the proposer would play into it would be patently absurd to everyone I know.  For DoD grants, the review is more "in house" at the specific agency, but it's still taken very seriously and performed by program managers who manage their own portfolio and are accountable for its performance.

Essentially, I think you're seeing what we all know.  The big 10 schools are generally very strong academically.  Strong research schools get that way by hiring the most innovative faculty. Those faculty are doing exciting work and given the resources they need to succeed, leading to more grant funding.  While the reputation of a school may influence the perception of the proposers ability to do what they are saying, the conference affiliation (or even AAU affiliation) just doesn't come up in the scientific review that these decisions are made from.  

So, from my experience in the process, I just don't see how CIC lobbying (or even AAU lobbying) could play any major role in the bulk of the allocated money.  Again, maybe it does for the few big projects allocated every year, but the total dollars in this small segment  are still nothing on the order of atheletic budgets.  Let me know if you have some experience with this that leads you to think differently, but otherwise I think there is some correlation being confused as causation here.

MosherJordan, sorry to misinterpret your comments.  When you said "a non-partisan peer review process to allocate research money (think national academy of science)", I thought you were saying NAS was doing funding review.

I understand your NRA example.  See my response above to colin.  I agree that there can be influence on broad areas of funding.  As I said above, it's much harder to imagine a mechanism where influence about specific schools to fund can be exerted (again, I'm addressing the bulk of funding for "normal" grants and not grants to fund research centers, which do have more political influence).

The main thesis of your original post was that CIC membership can confer some lobbying advantage on specific schools that are members, and moreover, that advantage is big enough to drive the decisions we're seeing about atheletic alignment.  How would this advantage come into play?  Again, I think most of what you're showing is correlation and not causation.  You could make a case for causation if you can think of a mechanism, but I just don't see ways that the CIC could come into an NIH study section and say "you know, we really should fund something at one of our member schools".

You're right that there can be bias.  As I said above, the general perception of the quality of the school can play a part in the evaluation (mostly because places less well regarded don't have as much infrastructure to support the research being proposed).  So, the overall reputation does have some affect, though I wouldn't say it's anything close to a primary factor for places like NSF/NIH (in fact, NSF seems to try and explicitly fund things are more disadvantaged institutions).

So, what about reputation?  For the most part, the review panels are so specialized that they are thinking of the reputation of the specific department rather than the broad school.  For example, when someone from your department submits a proposal, the review panel is so specialized that they may have in mind the strength of mathematics at UM moreso than the overall strength of UM (weak schools can have good indivudal departments and vice versa).  When someone doesn't have this knowledge, the overall school reputation can help that.  In that case, AAU membership does carry a certain amount of prestige that can help the overall reputation.  Frankly, CIC membership just does not.  For the most part, no one knows what the CIC is.  The atheletic watching public may think more highly of Rutgers/UMD because they are now in the big ten, but for a scientist who is very specialized in their field, they probably don't even know what the CIC is and  reputation of that specific discipline at Rutgers/UMD didn't just change because of CIC membership.   

You could also try and say that CIC members are now "in the club" and people from other CIC schools will try to more favorably review their work.  Generally you can't review things from the school you work at.  And, I don't think anyone cares to favor stuff from schools from the same conference.  To say it simply, the review is so specialized, technical and distributed across people from several institutions that it's hard to imagine that people would have this type of bias.

Why the desire to be an AAU member?  General prestige, which is beneficial.  Feeling like you have a voice in the lobbying effort.  This effort is mostly in support of increased federal funding overall.  While a rising tide lifts all boats, if you have more resources and a better reputation, you might get risen a little higher.

I know a few people in the math dept at UM pretty well.  Ask some of the faculty there if they even know what the CIC is.  I bet you'll be surprised at how little of a factor it is in people's thinking.  It gets talked about on this board a lot.  I live and work in the world of federal research funding every day, and I have never once heard the CIC even mentioned in that world.  Again, I appreciate the research you put into it, but I think it vastly overstates the importance of CIC membership.  I guess you can wait a few years to see if Rutgers or UMD had any specific effect from it.

Sure, there are earmarks that are outside the usual federal grantmaking process.  I have to admit that I don't know much about this aspect of the funding landscape.

That being said, I still don't necessarily understand the argument you're trying to make about CIC membership playing a big role in that.  I can understand the argument that a member of congress would try to get an earmark to help a school in their district.  Are you trying to say that if a school in their district was a CIC member, then they would also try harder to get an earmark for another CIC school (not in their district)?  I don't know about this directly, but it seems unlikely to me.  I would be more inclined to believe that they would be trying to get an earmark for a school in someone else's district that they're trying to get a favor from.

As I said above, I can imagine AAU membership contributes to some bias due to a notion of prestige.  I just don't think the CIC confers that (at least not to the scientists sitting on the review panels that the decisions are based off of).  Again, I've never heard AAU/CIC membership even discussed in this arena.  Perhaps it's having some effect in the earmark process....I don't know.  In the link you gave, the numbers are tens of millions of dollars per school (and this is for the schools receiving the most earmarked money).  While that is a lot of money, it really pales in comparison to the overall budgets.  For example, the annual research expenditures of my department are in the neighborhood of $60M.  If this is the main mechanism of trying to see gain from CIC influence, it seems hard to beleive that an amount of money that is a fraction of what one department may spend in a year is enough to make a substantial move for the whole university.

I don't know that the comparison to endowments (or even BTN money) is entirely correct.  Both of those reveune sources are very flexible and can be spent on anything you want.  An earmark is tied to something specific (i.e., funding the project that's been earmarked).  So, while I'm sure the general consensus is to take the money to do something interesting, in order to spend that money you would have to do the work.  Even assuming BTN funds are segregated to the atheletic budget, they are probably used to fund non-revenue sports, etc.

I get your overall analogy that $10M is a lot of money (but this is for some of the top receivers of earmarks, and is a one-time thing rather than a sustained revenue source).  I just haven't seen anything that convinces me the CIC membership specifically would play any role in it.  Further, I think I tend to disagree that the conference realignment is substantially motivated by any of this.  In any of these conversations, the amount of money that may possibly be moved by it is just a drop in the bucket compared to the budgets that the universities and funding agencies are dealing with.

Hmmm...I'm very surprised to read that.  I totally agree with the statement that the trend is to multi-university awards.  But, when people are forming teams to compete for these awards, you look for the best technical people.  I've never heard of instances where people would try to arrange these teams based on conference (or in this case, CIC) affiliation.  I guess I'm still skeptical that it plays any significant role, but we don't really have a test case to check right now.  Let's wait a few years and then see if anything substantial has changed with Rutgers/UMD.  Nebraska probably isn't a fair evaluation, since their AAU status changed about the same time and you would never be sure which effect was most important.

Interesting question.  It might get an attempt to comply by some people.  What's hard about that is that a specific project usually needs some particular expertise.  The affiliated schools may not have people with that expertise or may have people that are not the best possible option.  Do you reduce the quality of the team to comply with that sort of pressure?  So, my first guess was that it would largely be ignored by most people, except in cases where it worked out easily.  This is also supported by the amount of disrespect generally given by faculty to things like strategic plans and vision statements from administrators.

On the other hand, I'm in a city with another major university.  This other school clearly has complementary expertise to ours, and there is general encouragement to try and find collaborations.  On the whole, I am seeing a little increase in explicit effort to build joint programs and I think this is generally viewed positively by the faculty.  There are very obvious benefits here though.....same city and clearly non-overlapping expertises.  I don't know if you could extrapolate to the CIC where the schools are close but still not in the same city, and expertises are much more overlapping.  The motivation for the "encouragement" is still not clear to me, and therefore, it may be less interesting to the faculty that actually have to carry it out.

Yeah, I mostly lurk and read, but everyone once and a while there is something I actually know about and can contribute to.  At this rate it will only be another 15-20 years before I can start my own posts!

a lot, and I see why MosherJordan is looking at it in the way he is. Basically, while Maryland and New Jersey are decent-sized states, they really aren't growing that fast, and locals just don't seem to be that excited about local college sports there, unless they're alumni of schools that have them, not necessarily even Maryland and Rutgers. Jim Delany must have the same info we do about cable models getting destroyed, demographics, athletic prowess, etc. Frankly, as most of us have seen, adding these schools doesn't make tons of sense on the surface in terms of athletics, and demographics is actually an iffier argument than it would be for more southerly states. So, that raises the question of why, given all that, these schools would still seem attractive. This leads to (I mean no disrespect whatsoever, but can't think of a better term) a "conspiracy theory", because all the stuff on the surface seems to say that doing this wasn't a good idea, and the wealthiest conference in the country doesn't get that way by doing stupid stuff. It's an attempt to ascribe meaning to something that seems senseless right now.

I don't know if there is an attempt to really make the CIC into something big for research, or to make the B1G the official public ivy league, or something along those lines, but it seems to make the most sense of all the other explanations we've heard.

No, I totally understand.  I agree that there is something playing into it that we're probably not all aware of.  It seems like cable markets are getting talked about a lot, I also agree that this seems like a terrible idea looking forward (and I hope that they're smart enough to realize that....they do have a history of successful decision making, division names aside).

While I agree that looking in this direction from MosherJordan is worthwhile, my big original complaint is that the conclusions were way overstated.  It was claiming a causal connection from something that has a reasonable explanation just as a correlation.  If you want to claim causality from this, then you have to also include a reasonable mechanism.  That's the sticking point for me.  In my experience, I just don't see a mechanism in the federal funding process where this could result in a payoff of a big enough size to make a difference.  Given the quote from the UMD official above, maybe I'm just not looking forward enough.  Maybe there is speculation about a major change in the funding structure (which is entirely possible) that would favor something like CIC membership more than it is now.

but perhaps as a "natural experiment", two schools in the same state, Iowa and Iowa State, have vastly different research expenditures according to this: http://mup.asu.edu/research2011.pdf. Iowa in 2009 did about $250 million in research, while Iowa State did less than $100 million. Same state, same population served, though Iowa has a medical school, while ISU has the ag school, a la Michigan and MSU, so I'm not sure if any firm conclusions can be drawn.

EDIT: Actually, according to that, Pitt has way high research expenditures, and would make much more sense in that regard.