U.S. academic R&D ~$108.8B FY2023 across 914 institutions; top 30 capture 42%

NCSES Higher Education Research and Development Survey: Fiscal Year 2023 (NSF 25-313) is a census of 914 universities and colleges that granted a bachelor's degree or higher and expended at least $150,000 in R&D in FY2022. Total higher-education R&D expenditure reached $108.8 billion in FY2023, an 11.2% increase over FY2022. The top 30 institutions alone account for 42% of that total.

This is the population-level baseline against which the representative-R1 analysis in §5.3.2 (C-0005) is applied. The $200M annual R&D figure used in the representative case sits in the middle of the R1 distribution: above the $50M Carnegie threshold (E-0088), well below the per-institution share that the top 30 capture, and proximate to the median R1 by both R&D dollars and publication volume.