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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]External research grants can be used to fund professors. These professors then may be paid a small portion of their salary from the university while a large percent of their salary comes from the grant. Furthermore a portion of research money is dedicated to university functions i.e. building expenses, etc.

Meanwhile, universities with less research may have to pay the entirety of the professor's salary with university funds. [/quote]

Research grants are typically restricted to purpose.  Tuition is unrestricted.  From a Council on Government Relations report authored by university aministrators:

"Sources of revenue for both public and private research universities can be divided into
unrestricted and restricted resources. Unrestricted resources can be used at the discretion
of the institution for the primary missions of teaching, research, public service, or any
other activity. The primary unrestricted sources for operations are state appropriations
(public) and tuition (both public and private). Restricted resources are those that are
limited in use by third parties, such as donors and research sponsors. Restrictions are
typically related to the use of the resources for a particular organizational unit (e.g., the
physics department), to a particular purpose (e.g., music scholarships), or to a specific
activity (e.g., NIH-funded cancer research). "

"Revenue that supports a federally sponsored research program is required by the sponsor to have a one-to-one relationship
with the expenditures for that program. On the other hand, revenue sources that are
unrestricted, such as state appropriations and tuition, support a wide range of institutional
activities, including teaching, student services, and administration; the one-to-one
revenue-expenditure relationship does not exist. Instead, a single, limited pool of
unrestricted revenue is expended according to the competing needs and priorities of the
university."

Authors include:  James Luther, Committee Chairman Cynthia Hope
Duke University University of Alabama
James Barbret Terry Johnson
Wayne State University University of Iowa
Sara Bible Ron Maples
Stanford University University of Tennessee System
Mary Lee Brown Kim Moreland
University of Pennsylvania University of Wisconsin
Michael Daniels Ryan Rapp (Volunteer)
Northwestern University University of Missouri System
Kelvin Droegemeier John Shipley
University of Oklahoma University of Miami
Dan Evon Cathy Snyder
Michigan State University Vanderbilt University
Jill Ferguson (Volunteer and Editor) Eric Vermillion (Retired)
University of Missouri, Columbia University of California,
 San Francisco

About 30% of research budget comes from institutional funding on average, since the grants don't cover all costs.  A significant part of that likely comes from unrestricted funds (tuition, state appropriations).  So again I dispute your claim that more research is necessarily better from an undergraduate education point of view.

https://www.cogr.edu/COGR/files/ccLibraryFiles/Filename/000000000267/Finances%20of%20Research%20Universities_June%202014.pdf [/quote]
Simply untrue.

1. Federal funds may be required for research - which note that it includes research assistantships, facilities and supplies, etc. which would other wise come from the university's purse - but top researchers that are normally contracted to teach 3 classes a semester, for example, can set aside a portion of the research money they have won and give it to the university to "buy" their way out of teaching the 3rd class. In turn, the university then uses that money to hire another professor. In this manner, large research universities can maintain a huge number of faculty, each that may only teach 1 grad and 1 undergrad course a semester. This provides variety in the number of professors and the number of courses offered at the research university. A non-research university therefore generally has a smaller faculty in the various departments

2. Furthermore, research universities don't only get funding from the federal government, but also from industry and other organizations. These industry research funds can be used to heavily supplement the income of the professors researching on the project that the funding has been granted for. For example, a research university might pay maximum base salary of $250,000 for professors. However, if that professor's lab or research group then wins funding from industry, it can supplement the professor's income massively i.e. to $500,000 for the year. Essentially, the research university can attract professors that are way out of the university's budget - i.e. if they are a state university especially - because the professor's affiliation with the research university (and the facilities that the university provides) allows the professor to win huge research funds from industry/organizations. This way, a research university can attract far more 'expensive' professors to work at the university who would other wise not come due to the lower pay. Meanwhile a non-research university would have to flat out pay the $500,000/yr salary in order to attract the same caliber of professors to work there. [b]Why do you think universities like Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, Purdue, Georgia Tech, UIUC, etc. can be the top of the field in research and compete with the Ivies, despite being state universities with comparably small endowments?[/b] How can they attract professors who could be enticed by Ivy-level salaries? External industry research funding, which heavily skews towards medical, natural sciences and engineering. [/quote]

These are all universities that don't get very good ratings for undergraduate faculty teaching (accessible, interested in student's success, prepared, etc.)  Michigan is probably going to do better than Berkeley and UCLA on those.  UC schools are often among the worst in these types of assessments.   Yes, the public research universities can compete with the smaller privates in research and also graduate study.  They do it at the expense of undergraduates in my view.  Sponsored research alone requires about $40B a year in university institutional funding.  When you consider that paid time to develop research proposals, etc. is counted by NACUBO as instruction (departmental research), the actual cost could be another $40B or more on top of that.  In business, they would look at where actual time is spent (undergraduate instruction, graduate instruction, and research).  When this was actually done for the University of California system, the result showed that undergraduate students on average got less than the value of their tuition paid.  In other words, even with a state subsidy, the undergraduate students were net subsidizing graduate education and research.  The state passed a bill to require the universities to report actual time spent by activity.  So far, the UC system has found a way not to comply.  [/quote]

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