"President Obama's and Congress' decision to allocate stimulus dollars to research and development, student financial aid, as well as helping our instructional institutions maintain critical operating budgets was vital to our ability to serve students and help us revive the Nevada economy," said Dan Klaich, chancellor of the Nevada System of Higher Education. 

 

Since last April, NSHE has received $14.4 million for research programs, $5.5 million for student financial aid, and $184.4 million from stabilization funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). These grants fund a broad array of instructional and scientific programs and support almost 2,100 jobs throughout the System.

 

In research, development, and contract activities, through September 30, 2009, the Nevada System of Higher Education received 34 awards and contracts for a total of $14.4 million in funding. These funds support research projects in areas such as medicine, engineering, and the environment as well as providing for workforce training programs and other quality of life initiatives. 

NSHE students were also direct beneficiaries of ARRA funds through increases in Pell awards and Federal Work Study Funds.  The Pell award increase, from $4,731 to $5,350 per student, is anticipated to bring an additional $5 million in student financial aid to Nevada students.  Likewise, the increase in Federal Work Study awards is expected to generate approximately $500,000 in additional student financial aid.

 

The largest single category of ARRA funds awarded to NSHE was the State Fiscal Stabilization Funds.  These funds were intended to help stabilize state and local government budgets in order to minimize and avoid reductions in education and other essential public services. The NSHE allocation, which funded approximately 14 percent of the system-wide institutional instructional budgets is as follows:

 

 

A provision in the law requires that institutions receiving ARRA support report to the federal government on a quarterly basis the number of jobs that were created or retained as a result of the funding.

 

The first report was due to the federal government on October 10 and is scheduled to be released on October 30 on the federal Recovery Act Web site (http://www.recovery.gov/).

 

Since May, nearly 2,100 NSHE employees have had positions created or retained with ARRA-related funds.  These include both positions created for new projects such as research, as well as a calculated average of existing positions that were not subject to elimination.   

 

Research labs are typically engaged in multiple projects simultaneously, many of which are supported by separate research grants. Therefore, faculty and lab employees' salaries are often paid out of different research accounts.

 

When ARRA-related activity is consolidated to reflect full-time-equivalent positions, the awards fully funded the equivalent of 15.91 jobs through the end of September.  Likewise, institutional instruction budgets are funded from a variety of sources and the calculated average represents an average of positions, in this case 2,064.47, that were not eliminated due to the availability of ARRA funds.

 

These job numbers do not include projects that received funding toward the end of the reporting period and may not yet have made payroll expenditures. Additionally, many of these awards support multi-year research projects so the total job impact will be stretched out over several years.

 

NSHE officials stress that these funds continue to flow to the institutions with new awards announced on a weekly basis. The research grants from agencies such as the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation are awarded on a programmatic basis, meaning that scientists and institutions compete for various pools of federal research dollars.

 

Applications are peer reviewed and funds awarded as decisions are made on individual research priorities established by the agencies and Congress. In total, these agencies have $22 billion in stimulus-related research and development funds that they are required to allocate by next October.

 

"We believe that our scientists will be highly competitive for these research dollars," said Klaich. "The nature of the peer review process is that the best science rises to the top and we believe that over the next year we will see a considerable influx in stimulus-related research funding to the NSHE and that the impact of those funds, both in terms of jobs and new discoveries, will be significant."

 

The Nevada System of Higher Education will provide periodic updates on ARRA-related activity at www.nevada.edu, including information on total funding, awards, job impact, and profiles of individual research projects.