As mentioned earlier, research expenditure data is not always easily available. With some digging, however, I have been able to find engineering research expenditure data from NSF from US and a few universities from Canada. The result is a fairly interesting graph:
Initially it was a surprise to see Johns Hopkins way ahead at the top. On further consideration, perhaps it is understandable; life science and medical research generally require the most funding, and as JHU really focuses in this area, the focus of its engineering research has been in the biomedical area also. But I don't think this is the whole story.
If we consider just the government contributions, the top 5 is listed in the following table (note the dollar figures use a base in thousands):
Not only does JHU receives more than the combined amount of second and third place, and 6% of all government fundings, it is the only private university in the top 5.
I was initially puzzled by this, until I read the fine prints of the NSF data - the data includes APL funding. Affiliated with JHU due to historical reasons, APL is essentially a government defense contractor, with close links to DoD and NASA. This fact would not only explain JHU, but also surprising entrants like CNSE at SUNY Albany. These institutions may not feature well in ranking systems that base research excellence on publication and citation counts because a reasonable number of projects are strictly classified. I would not be surprised, however, if there is much world-class expertise hidden in these institutions. It would be interesting to apply research expenditure as a metric to one of the existing ranking algorithms and see how the rankings would change.
For Canada, U of T , UBC, and Waterloo receives the most NSERC funding, and were thus the subject of my interest. U of T squeaks into the top 40 while UBC is hovering at 70. Waterloo data was not easily available. Extrapolating from NSERC data, it should be somewhere between U of T and UBC, around the top 60 mark. Although somewhat underwhelming when compared to universities in a country with a significantly larger GDP, Canada has been consistently showing improvement year over year compared to US schools. Tri-council funding has consistently increased while American government funding has stagnated or even decreased. American public schools have been particularly affected, due to more limited third-party contributions. University of Toronto, for example, has boosted its funding to over 80 million in the most recent fiscal year, which would boost it up into the top 30, should-to-shoulder with such distinguished schools as Utah State and SUNY Buffalo, but ahead of the likes of Princeton and Duke in 2013 terms.
Some technical notes:
This is my first mini project done in Python using the pandas module. Some familiarity with the module is achieved, but I find the module is narrowly focused on data manipulation. For convenience in doing calculations, it was faster to convert back to the old familiar numpy arrays and converting back to pandas dataframe after the calculations. This is clearly sub-optimal, and hopefully better solutions exist.