How the FY2024 NSF HERD figures on this site are built

The release this page reads

NSF publishes one HERD release a year. We load it once, record what we loaded, and every page on this site is built from that record. Nothing here calls a live service, so a figure cannot change between two pages loaded a minute apart.

One date is missing from that table, and it is the one you might most want: the day NSF published the release. No HERD table records it, so we do not print it. The freshness line at the foot of every page says when we built our copy from NSF's published tables, which is a different fact and is written as one.

What the survey covers

The Higher Education Research and Development Survey is run by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Science Foundation. It asks US colleges and universities what they spent on research and development in a fiscal year. It is a census rather than a sample: every institution that spent at least $150,000 on separately budgeted research is asked, and the bottom of our national list is where you can see that rule bite: the smallest total anyone reported this year is $150 thousand.

This release covers FY2010 to FY2024. In FY2024, 925 institutions reported $117.7 billion between them, and the long trend on an institution page runs over 15 years.

An institution appears on this site only if it reported. A gap in a table is a year an institution did not report, not a zero, and we print an em dash rather than a number we do not have.

The survey at NSF NCSES, where the tables themselves live.

How money is shown

NSF publishes these figures in thousands of dollars, and that is how we store them. On a page they are shown in millions or billions to one decimal, so $117.7 billion is the FY2024 national total and an institution reporting $868,412 thousand reads as $868.4 million. Below a million we print thousands rather than "$0.0 million", because the full rankings reach institutions that reported $150 thousand.

A percentage change is computed from the unrounded figures, so it will not always match the arithmetic you get from the two rounded numbers on the page.

Ranks and ties

Rank is a competition rank on total research spending, largest first. Institutions that reported exactly the same total share a rank, and the next rank is skipped: two institutions at 40 are followed by 42, not 41.

In FY2024, 36 groups of institutions reported exactly the same total and share a rank, 75 institutions in all. That is why 925 institutions hold only 886 distinct ranks, and why the lowest rank on the list is 923 rather than 925.

Rank change is last year's rank minus this year's, so a positive number means the institution moved up. An institution with no comparable prior year has no rank change at all, which is not the same as a rank change of zero.

Every ranking page ranks within its own population, so one institution carries several ranks at once: its place nationally, its place in its state, and its place in its Carnegie class. They are the same spending measured against different lists.

Why a prior-year rank can move

NSF revises earlier years when it publishes a new one. This site always uses the newest release's version of a year, never the version that year was first published with. So the FY2023 figure beside a FY2024 figure here is FY2023 as NSF revised it, and it can differ from the FY2023 you saw on our old Power BI dashboard, which used the numbers as first published.

Take FY2023. Its own survey covered 911 institutions; this release carries FY2023 for 895, 16 fewer. NSF now puts the national total at $108.8 billion rather than the $108.9 billion it published at the time.

That is why a rank moves. Rank is a place in a list, and those are two different lists: FY2023 ranked among the 895 institutions this release carries is not the same number as FY2023ranked among the 911 its own survey counted, even for an institution whose own total did not change at all.

We chose revised over first-published because it is the comparison NSF itself makes: the change columns compare like with like, both years as the same release measured them.

Two series, never mixed

HERD has two reporting forms. 681 of the 925 institutions in FY2024 file the standard form, which asks for the full detail; the other 244 file a short form.

That gives us two series, and no chart on this site draws them on one line. Ranks, prior-year figures and every change column come from the all-institution series, which covers FY2021 onward. The long trend back to FY2010 comes from the revised standard-form series. An institution page says under its chart which of the two it is drawing, because for a short-form institution the long line is the sum of its six reported funding sources rather than a reported total.

Carnegie classes and the crosswalk

R1, R2, D/PU and S4Y-R on this site are the 2021 Carnegie basic classification, joined to each institution on its IPEDS unit id. We use the 2021 codes because they are what the old dashboard ranked by and what the ranking pages' URLs name.

The join does not always land. NCSES reports some institutions as one combined unit with no IPEDS id of its own — Johns Hopkins with its Applied Physics Laboratory is the best-known — and the Carnegie file we join against dropped the 2021 code for the restructured Penn State campuses. A crosswalk of 50 rows covers the gap: 27 name the flagship campus whose id to use, 1 states the 2021 class outright, and 22 are deliberately left unclassified because there is nothing to classify them as: system offices, sub-units reported separately, and research institutes the classification never covered. Every row carries the reason it is there.

The newer designation is a different field

NSF also carries a newer Carnegie research designation, with labels like "Research 1" and "Research Colleges and Universities". It is not the same field as the 2021 basic code and it does not line up with it.

In this release they part company over 35 of the 132 institutions in R2: 32 of them are "Research 1" under the newer designation.

A ranking page's population comes from the 2021 code, never from the newer designation. If you are comparing our R2 list against one built the other way, that table is the difference.

The Carnegie Classification, which publishes both.

HBCUs and Hispanic-enrolling institutions

This release carries 57 Historically Black Colleges and Universities, ranked on a page of their own.

It also flags 154 institutions for high Hispanic enrolment, which is a question NSF asks and not the federal Hispanic-Serving Institution designation. The two lists are not the same, so we say "Hispanic-enrolling institutions" in prose and "HEIs" where a column header has no room, and the Hispanic-enrolling ranking page is named the same way. This is the only place on the site where the federal designation is named.

The movers floor

The fastest-growing page lists an institution only if it reported in both FY2023 and FY2024 and its FY2023 total was at least $5.0 million. That leaves 451 of the 925 institutions in the release eligible for the list.

Without the floor the list is arithmetic rather than news, because a small base turns a small amount of money into a large percentage. 444 institutions reported both years with a prior total under the floor, and the largest percentage gain among them is +2,606% on a rise of $7.7 million — which would sit on the page above the institution that added $329.9 million.

The list is written from the release by the same pull that writes every other figure on these pages, so it changes when the release does rather than sitting as a hard-coded top ten the way the old dashboard's did.

What this is not

These pages are provided as is, without warranty of any kind. NSF's published tables are the authority; where this site and NSF disagree, NSF is right.

The survey measures what an institution spent in a year, not what it was awarded and not the quality of the work. A rank on this site is a rank on spending, and nothing else.

Attribution

Data: National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, National Science Foundation, Higher Education Research and Development Survey, FY2024.

Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.