UT Arlington research contributes $226 million to U.S. economy

A new report shows that research projects at The University of Texas at Arlington contributed one quarter of a billion dollars—$226.4 million, to be exact—to the national economy through 797 vendor contracts and subcontracts between 2018 and 2022. Of those contracts, 111 were from small businesses and 87 from minority- or woman-owned businesses.

“Research coming from UT Arlington faculty and students not only helps solve some of society’s most vexing problems, but it is also an important economic driver for business development,” said Kate C. Miller, vice president for research and innovation at UTA. “This report makes clear that UTA research spending has a significant ripple effect throughout the local, regional and national economies.”

The report, produced by the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS), also detailed the impact of UTA’s research spending on specific industries. For example, between 2018 and 2022, companies in the educational services sector received contracts for research-related services from UTA worth $35.9 million; for professional, scientific and technical services contractors, $29.1 million; and for manufacturing companies, $17.8 million.

Much of the external money that came to UTA for research originated as federally sponsored research grants from organizations like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the departments of Defense, Transportation, Commerce, and Energy. Additional research funding came from philanthropic organizations and state and local government organizations.

IRIS created the report by linking UT Arlington’s administrative data with industry and workforce data from business publisher Orbis, which contains information on characteristics of businesses, such as whether they are owned by minorities or women. The resulting reports masked the identities of any individual organizations once the University administrative data was matched with the Orbis datasets.

IRIS is a national consortium of leading research universities organized around an institutional review board-approved data repository and housed at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan.

“Linking data from multiple sources this way reveals important insights into the results of university research spending not only for the national and regional economies, but for specific industries as well,” said IRIS Executive Director Jason Owen-Smith, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan. “Other IRIS reports contain similar information on the career paths, earnings and outcomes for university employees and students. Through these data-driven reports, our goal is to better understand and explain, and ultimately improve, the public value of higher education and research.”