Top 20 Colleges of Agriculture
Based on Research
Expenditures in FY01 *
(Dollar figures are in millions.)

Public higher education is a competitive business. With state governments across the country shifting the burden of funding to the institutions themselves, students are finding themselves having to pay higher tuition, and faculty spending more time seeking grants/contracts to sponsor their work.

Mizzou and CAFNR are increasingly compared to other alternatives for quality. How does CAFNR compare to the nation’s other colleges of agriculture?

Turns out, this is the very question that both the Chancellor and Provost asked all the divisions across campus during the past year. It’s not how one MU college compares to another, but rather how we compare to similar colleges across the country. Are the funds allocated to CAFNR contributing to Mizzou’s excellence as gauged nationally? To help in this effort to measure our national status, three peer institutions were chosen for their similarity to our mission and scope.

CAFNR, as well as the other divisions across campus, was asked to frame its annual report to the Provost based upon how we stack up to our peer colleges at UC-Davis, Florida, and UW-Madison.

Looking only at the research and development enterprise, NSF’s latest data would rank UC-Davis as #1, Florida as #2, and UW-Madison as #26 in total research expenditures. MU’s CAFNR is currently ranked #17. [See table at left. For the specific data on agricultural sciences, see www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf03316/tables/tabb60.xls].

Interestingly, two of the peers chosen for the campus as a whole just happened to be the two largest agricultural colleges in the country.

If we examine the research expenditure data on a per capita basis, however (faculty population), the productivity of CAFNR’s faculty are ranked first. The average CAFNR faculty member accounts for just over $300,000 of annual research expenditures in the latest NSF available. [See figure below. Source: NSF expenditures data for FY01 and self-reported faculty FTE from each institution.]

The UM-System instituitional research office recently pulled a similar dataset together, but with the purpose of looking within CAFNR among the various disciplines. In comparing MU’s CAFNR departments versus all other similarly named departments across the country, our faculty was able to earn an average of more than 1.5x their disciplinary peers, with some departments averaging 4x the national mean. [See figure below. Source: UM-System office of institutional research.]

In this brief look at CAFNR research in comparison to our peers, we may not be the largest, but it seems we are indeed competitive among the best agricultural colleges in the country for attracting grants/contracts.

With CAFNR’s research funding increasingly coming from gifts/grants/contracts (58 percent of our approximately $67M in annual expenditures last year), the performance of our faculty is critical to our research and development mission. And, based on this recent peek at our benchmarks, our faculty are doing an outstanding job.

Regards,
John

Note: The entire CAFNR report recently prepared and presented to the Provost’s staff is available as a PDF. Other data we could obtain about our teaching mission was found equally impressive in terms of CAFNR faculty productivity.