University research and development expenditures reached $68.8 billion in FY 2015, an increase of 2.2 percent from FY 2014, according to recently released data from the Higher Education Research and Development (HERD) Survey by the National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics within the National Science Foundation. While the bulk of the funding (55.2 percent of total R&D expenditures) comes from federal expenditures, in current dollars, federally funded R&D at universities dropped 0.2 percent from $37.96 billion to $37.88 billion in FY 2015. Meanwhile, nonfederal R&D expenditures accounted for 44.8 percent of the total in FY 2015 compared to 43.5 percent in FY 2014 growing from $29.24 billion in FY 2014 to $30.79 billion in FY 2015.
