For the past two decades, the Washington Monthly has included in its annual college rankings measures of a university's research prowess -- its record of producing the new scholarship and scholars that drive economic growth and human flourishing. This year, we've put those metrics into a separate ranking, the Best Colleges for Research, which appear at the end of this article. It is the only such ranking published by a journalistic outlet -- and a necessary one, given the Trump administration's unprecedented attacks on university research.
There are other reasons why we created this new research ranking. This spring, the organization that categorizes colleges, the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, rewrote its definitions of what constitutes different types of institutions, including major research universities. We also decided this year to compare research universities to other types of institutions, like small liberal arts colleges that focus on teaching rather than research, to see which institutions are best at helping students succeed in their careers and engage as democratic citizens (see Best Colleges for Your Tuition (and Tax) Dollars). The only fair way to do that was to pull our research metrics into their own ranking.
But most of all, at a time when the Trump administration is decimating funding for academic research, we wanted to illuminate the incredible benefits that America's research universities provide to the country at large and to the states and regions where they're located -- and the unfathomable damage these cuts are likely to bring.
Before we delve into the ranking, it's important to understand how the United States built its world-class system of federally funded university-based research -- a system that was neither inevitable nor, as we are now learning, invulnerable. In the early 20th century, Europe was the undisputed engine of scientific discovery. Aspiring top scientists didn't dream of going to Harvard or Stanford. They went to Göttingen, where Max Born and Werner Heisenberg were pioneering quantum mechanics; to the Sorbonne, where Marie Curie revolutionized chemistry and medicine; or to Cambridge, where Ernest Rutherford and Paul Dirac rewrote the laws of atomic theory. A young New York-born physicist named J. Robert Oppenheimer followed that path -- studying at Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory before earning his doctorate under Born in 1927. At the time, American universities were respected teaching institutions. But they stood on the periphery of the global scientific frontier.
That changed abruptly when the United States made scientific supremacy a national strategy during World War II. In 1939, Oppenheimer was lecturing at chalkboards at UC Berkeley. Just four years later, as part of the Manhattan Project, the University of California was contracted by the federal government to operate the Los Alamos Laboratory, with Oppenheimer leading thousands of scientists in one of the most ambitious research efforts ever under-taken. It wasn't just the birth of the atomic bomb. It was also the birth of the modern American research university -- powered by a new kind of partnership between public investment and university-led inquiry. For more than 80 years, that system has fueled nearly every major scientific and technological breakthrough of the modern era.
That success was the result of deliberate postwar planning -- shaped in large part by Vannevar Bush, the former MIT engineering dean who oversaw wartime science policy. In 1945, Bush submitted a report to President Harry Truman titled Science, the Endless Frontier, which called for sustained federal funding of universities to conduct research both for specific goals -- to combat disease, ensure national security, and raise living standards -- but also to advance scientific knowledge for its own sake. "Basic research is the pacemaker of technological progress," he wrote.
The system was designed to be decentralized, competitive, and entrepreneurial. Unlike European countries, in which most universities are operated at national or regional levels, the United States has a geographically dispersed array of state-owned and private nonprofit colleges and universities. Different federal agencies -- the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the National Institutes of Health, and so on -- set the broad parameters for grants based on their own agency's goals. But scholars anywhere in the country could propose specific research projects, and decisions on which would get funding were made not by federal officials but by peer review panels of scholars, also from around the country. The system incentivized states to invest their own tax dollars in their public universities by recruiting top scholars who could win federal research grants and top graduate students who could work on those grants. It was, in short, an American-style, market-based solution to the task of building scientific capacity.
The scale of this transformation is hard to overstate. Before World War II, federal spending accounted for just 20 percent of all U.S. research and development. By the 1960s, it made up two-thirds. Federal support for university research rose from under $70 million in 1940 (about 1 percent of today's levels, adjusted for inflation) to more than $20 billion by 2000. By then, American university labs had given the world the polio vaccine, the internet, satellite navigation, the MRI, and much more.
As of 2023, U.S. universities spent over $108 billion on research and development -- more than half of it funded by the federal government. That spending underpins not just scientific progress but entire regional economies. It trains the STEM workforce, fuels innovation, and creates good jobs far from the coasts. According to economists across the political spectrum, university-based R&D delivers one of the highest returns on investment of any federal expenditure. It produces breakthroughs, but also pipelines: of talent, of human capital, and of opportunity.
The Best Colleges for Research ranking is like an MRI of that system. It rates 139 institutions that each spend at least $100 million annually on research based on four equally weighted indicators: total research spending, science and engineering PhDs awarded, faculty receiving major national awards, and the share of faculty elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
But a word of warning: This MRI was taken when the patient was at peak health. All the underlying data is from before January of this year, when Donald Trump was inaugurated. Since then, the NDF has frozen or canceled more than 1,700 grants, many of them focused on recruiting more women and racial minorities into STEM fields. The NIH faces proposed cuts of up to 40 percent for the fiscal year 2026 budget -- jeopardizing over $10 billion in funding. The Trump administration effectively dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, canceling the billions in grants it once dispensed. The Departments of Energy and Defense have shifted green energy and climate funds elsewhere. And the Department of Education has opened more than 60 campus investigations and frozen billions in grants to universities. Trump officials have also proposed slashing university overhead reimbursements from 50-60 percent to 15 percent -- effectively making much research unsupportable.
The first thing you'll notice when looking at the ranking is that the three universities at the top of the list -- Stanford, MIT, Harvard -- are precisely the kind you would target if you were Donald Trump and your aim was to punish elites in blue states. Another prestigious university, fifth-ranked Johns Hopkins, in deep blue Maryland, receives more federal research dollars than any university in the country. Those grant funds allow the institution to support more than 30,000 jobs in Baltimore and run the Applied Physics Laboratory, a critical player in U.S. missile defense and cybersecurity. But since Trump took office for the second time, Johns Hopkins has lost over $800 million in global health research -- most of it when DOGE pulled the plug on USAID. The fallout: 600 clinical trials disrupted and vaccine development halted midstream. Consider those libs owned.
The second thing you'll notice is that it's not just elite private universities in blue coastal cities that rank highly on the list -- and stand to lose big from Trump's defunding of research universities. Like much of Trump's second-term agenda, the cuts end up punishing the very people and places he claims to champion.
Five of the top 20 universities (including the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Michigan) as well as two dozen more on the list are in swing states that Trump barely won in 2024 and that will likely determine who wins the presidency in 2028. Nearly 50 other institutions that make up the Best Colleges for Research ranking are in red states, including Texas A&M (number 16), the University of Florida (27), and Purdue University in Indiana (29).
These universities are not just major recipients of federal research dollars. As our ranking shows, many of them outperform Ivy League schools in awarding the STEM PhDs that keep the economy humming and America competitive in the world. (See chart).
These institutions, most of them public, train the bulk of the engineers who build America's infrastructure, the chemists who power our labs, and the computer scientists who staff defense contractors and clean energy start-ups. They, too, are facing devastating cuts. Between February and March, DOGE slashed more than $74 million in federal research grants going to 19 colleges and universities in Georgia, including the notoriously woke Georgia Institute of Technology. Case Western paused hiring and travel to brace for a projected $39 million loss. Louisiana State University imposed a campus-wide hiring freeze and withheld 2 percent of all department budgets as a buffer. Penn State lost $10 million in grants -- halting projects on HIV prevention, cervical cancer vaccines, and diagnostics for newborns. Administrators now advise faculty to strip keywords like diversity and climate from proposals to avoid triggering more cancellations.
A third pattern you might notice is that many of the universities at the top of our ranking are in a handful of the fastest-growing states -- California, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Florida. That's no coincidence. Remember that the system Vannevar Bush devised created incentives for states to invest in their public university systems. Not all states, however, acted on those incentives with the same intensity and focus. Those that made long-term bets on higher education, built centralized public university management systems, and kept in-state tuition low tended also to garner more federal research dollars and the corresponding economic growth. (See Christopher M. Mullin, "Florida's Fresh-Squeezed Colleges.")
Other, smaller states never made that bet on a similar scale and simply do not have as many options. In places like Montana and Nebraska, the local land grant is often the only serious research institution. As Joseph Parilla, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro, put it, "For a lot of places, [research] is the last remaining economic and innovation engine that gives them relevance in a modern, technology-driven economy." In other words, federal research funding isn't just science policy -- it's regional development policy. When it dries up, entire communities, not just institutions, suffer the consequences.
Our ranking reflects a system still running at high capacity. But the damage is already visible, and not just at Ivy League schools. Job offers to new PhDs are being rescinded. Labs are consolidating. Faculty are leaving.
In Mississippi, a state Trump won by over 22 points, the mayor of Starkville is sounding the alarm. "Every time you touch the university, you, in effect, touch Starkville," Mayor Lynn Spruill told The New York Times, after Mississippi State lost funding for a USAID aquaculture project. The school, which spent more than $150 million in federal research money last year, is now bracing for deeper cuts to engineering and agriculture programs -- key anchors of the local economy.
And as our ranking shows, the consequences won't be limited to blue states. The very regions Trump claims to fight for -- rural America, red America -- may be the ones hit hardest. What took 80 years to build won't take 80 years to unravel. But it may take that long to build again.