Physics Funding by Numbers
I just read today that HEFCE has decided on the way funds will be allocated for research following the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise. I have blogged about this previously (here, there and elsewhere), but to give you a quick reminder the exercise basically graded all research in UK universities on a scale from 4* (world-leading) to 1* (nationally recognized), producing for each department a profile giving the fraction of research in each category.
HEFCE has decided that English universities will be funded according to a formula that includes everything from 2* up to 4* but with a weighting 1:3:7. Those graded 1* and unclassified get no funding at all. How they arrived at this formula is anyone’s guess. Personally I think it’s a bit harsh on 2* which is supposed to be internationally recognized research, but there you go.
Assuming there is also a multiplier for volume (i.e. the number of people submitted) we can now easily produce another version of the physics research league table which reveals the relative amount of money each will get. I don’t know the overall normalisation, of course.
The table shows the number of staff submitted (second column) and the overall fundability factor based on a 7:3:1 weighting of the published profile multiplied by the figure in column 2. This is like the “research power” table I showed here, only with a different and much steeper weighting (7,3,1,0) versus (4,3,2,1).
1. University of Cambridge | 141.25 | 459.1 |
2. University of Oxford | 140.10 | 392.3 |
3. Imperial College London | 126.80 | 380.4 |
4. University College London | 101.03 | 298.0 |
5. University of Manchester | 82.80 | 227.7 |
6. University of Durham | 69.50 | 205.0 |
7. University of Edinburgh | 60.50 | 184.5 |
8. University of Nottingham | 44.45 | 144.5 |
9. University of Glasgow | 45.75 | 135.0 |
10. University of Warwick | 51.00 | 130.1 |
11. University of Bristol | 46.00 | 128.8 |
12. University of Birmingham | 43.60 | 126.4 |
13. University of Southampton | 45.30 | 120.0 |
14. Queen’s University Belfast | 50.00 | 115.0 |
15. University of Leicester | 45.00 | 114.8 |
16. University of St Andrews | 32.20 | 104.7 |
17. University of Liverpool | 34.60 | 96.9 |
18. University of Sheffield | 31.50 | 92.9 |
19. University of Leeds | 35.50 | 88.8 |
20. Lancaster University | 26.40 | 88.4 |
21. Queen Mary, University of London | 34.98 | 85.7 |
22. University of Exeter | 28.00 | 77.0 |
23. University of Hertfordshire | 28.00 | 72.8 |
24. University of York | 26.00 | 67.6 |
25. Royal Holloway, University of London | 27.96 | 67.1 |
26. University of Surrey | 27.20 | 65.3 |
27. Cardiff University | 32.30 | 64.6 |
28. University of Bath | 20.20 | 63.6 |
29. University of Strathclyde | 31.67 | 60.2 |
30. University of Sussex | 20.00 | 55.0 |
31. Heriot-Watt University | 19.50 | 51.7 |
32. Swansea University | 20.75 | 48.8 |
33. Loughborough University | 17.10 | 41.9 |
34. University of Central Lancashire | 22.20 | 41.1 |
35. King’s College London | 16.40 | 38.5 |
36. Liverpool John Moores University | 16.50 | 35.5 |
37. Aberystwyth University | 18.33 | 23.8 |
38. Keele University | 10.00 | 18.0 |
39. Armagh Observatory | 7.50 | 13.1 |
40. University of Kent | 3.00 | 4.5 |
41. University of the West of Scotland | 3.70 | 4.1 |
42. University of Brighton | 1.00 | 1.8 |
It looks to me that the fraction of funds going to the big three at the top will probably be reduced quite significantly, although apparently there are funds set aside to smooth over any catastrophic changes. I’d hazard a guess that things won’t change much for those in the middle.
I’ve left the Welsh and Scottish universities in the list for comparison, but there is no guarantee that HEFCW and SFC will use the same formula for Wales and Scotland as HEFCE did for England. I have no idea what is going to happen to Cardiff University’s funding at the moment.
Another bit of news worthing putting in here is that HEFCE has protected funding for STEM subjects (Science, Technology and Medicine) so that the apparently poor showing of some science subjects (especially physics) compared to, e.g., Economics will not necessarily mean that physics as a whole will suffer. How this works out in practice remains to be seen.
Apparently also the detailed breakdowns of how the final profiles were reached will go public soon. That will make for some interesting reading, although apparently everything relating to individual researchers will be shredded to prevent problems with the data protection act.
January 30, 2009 at 8:13 pm
That’s all very interesting.
The weighting scale certainly does the top four universities a lot of favours, and may be designed to do that. Oxford and Cambridge do so well by combining high quality profiles with large numbers of staff.
It is disappointing that individual results will not be made available to the researchers concerned. I’d really have liked to have seen my own assessment, as many other people would. I was included in an internal university mock R.A.E. in which the staff’s nominated best four papers were assessed by an anonymous panel brought in from outside; we were given our own results confidentially, although I suspect the real R.A.E. scores may have been a little more generous than the mock ones. It would be interesting to know how highly (or lowly) the R.A.E. panel assessed our own work, rather than merely the combined assessment in the assessed subject for the university, even if it were only to understand how the system had functioned on our own work.
January 30, 2009 at 11:09 pm
Bryn, not all the RAE profile comes from the papers. Some is awarded for “esteem” and “environment”, including counts of prestigious fellowships and numbers of PhD students produced etc. We’ll find out how these were rated as well as the papers and also the raw scores (not rounded to 5% as in the tables that have been released so far).
January 31, 2009 at 11:15 pm
Peter,
Yes, that’s right, esteem indicators and environment contributed to the final result. How in practice the panels managed to assess this in practice is
anybody’s guess. I can imagine most departments claiming something similar for environment.
Bryn.
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