Employment Impacts of Academic R&D Fiscal Year 2000 The AAU is often asked about the number of jobs supported by academic R&D funding in the U.S. There is no definitive answer to this question because it has never been addressed in any published studies. Furthermore, academic R&D is not, and has never been, intended or presented as a jobs-creating mechanism. In the last analysis, academic R&D makes a much more vital contribution to the nation's well-being-economic and otherwise-by advancing the frontiers of knowledge, by finding new cures and treatments for diseases, by helping to develop new technologies, and by training future generations of researchers and teachers. Nevertheless, experts in the field of economic impact analysis advise that it is possible to achieve a rough, conservative approximation of the immediate employment impacts of academic R&D by using state employment multipliers maintained by the U.S. Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA).1 These multipliers are frequently used in the development of studies of the economic impacts of individual universities and colleges. The application of these multipliers to selected categories of academic R&D activity for Fiscal Year 2000, the latest year for which such data are available, yield the following results: National Institutes of Health extramural grants2 (total $10.785 billion) 384,123 jobs National Science Foundation academic R&D grants (total $2.824 billion) 102,601 jobs Department of Defense academic research grants3 (total $2.007 billion) 72,047 jobs NASA academic R&D grants (total $1.016 billion) 37,904 jobs Department of Energy academic R&D grants (total $696.2 million) 25,230 jobs All federal R&D grants to universities and colleges4(total $19.879 billion) 717,243 jobs All R&D expenditures by doctorate-granting institutions5 (these institutions account for virtually all academic R&D; total $29.597 billion includes R&D supported by nonfederal sources) 1,079,116 jobs These jobs figures include both full- and part-time jobs. They also include jobs supported directly on campuses and jobs supported indirectly outside campuses as institutional expenditures ripple through local and state economies. To put these jobs figures in some perspective, the latest available figures from the Commerce Department indicate that the following numbers of persons were directly employed in the following manufacturing sectors in the U.S. during 1996, the latest year for which such data are available: tires, 73,300; logging, 78,220; communications equipment, 284,500; newspaper printing and publishing, 444,310; aircraft and related parts, 466,640; basic textiles, 516,380; motor vehicles and equipment, 1,012,990. 1The multipliers used in these computations are the latest available (1997) final-demand BEA multipliers for the "Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools" sector, adjusted for inflation. These particular multipliers are part of the hundreds of different sets of multipliers the BEA maintains for a wide variety of individual industries and sectors. Each set of multipliers is maintained individually for each state and each county within each state. This total includes only awards to colleges and universities. 2The total includes only awards to colleges and universities. 3Does not include DOD development grants to universities and colleges. 4Does not include funding for Federally Funded Research and Development Centers (FFRDCs) administered by academic institutions, but does include funding for the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which is not an FFRDC. 5Does not include expenditures by Federally Funded Research and Development Centers administered by academic institutions, but does include expenditures by the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which is not an FFRDC.