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.