About Our Database:
The NAS foreign funds database contains foreign-sourced gifts, grants, contracts, and tuition payments to over 70 public universities and affiliated state agencies, beginning as early as 2010. We filed more than 100 public records requests at public universities and state governments across the country to obtain this information. Our database contains the following variables:1
|
Variable |
Definition |
|
OPEID |
Unique identification number for universities created by the Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE), an office within the federal Department of Education (ED).2 Users can use this identifier to merge our data with other ED databases. |
|
Donation ID |
Unique identification number for each transaction, created by NAS |
|
Contract ID |
Identification number for contracts created by the university3 |
|
School |
Institutional recipient of foreign funds |
|
State |
Institutional recipient’s location |
|
Country of Origin |
Foreign country in which the donor is based4 |
|
Donor |
The name of the entity from which the foreign payment originated |
|
Source |
Indicates if data comes from the ED or the National Association of Scholars (NAS) |
|
Receipt Date |
The date when the university received the foreign payment |
|
Award Start Date |
If applicable, the date when the contract associated with the foreign payment became active |
|
Award End Date |
If applicable, the date when the contract associated with the foreign payment was, or will be, terminated |
|
Transaction Type |
Indicates if item is a contract, gift, or student tuition payment5 |
|
Amount |
The dollar amount received by the university |
|
Title |
The title of the project associated with the funds, or a brief description of the funds’ intended use |
|
Description |
Brief description of the funds’ intended use |
We have also included all funds reported to the Department of Education’s Section 117 database.6 The ED used to provide this information on their own portal. But in June 2024, the portal was phased out. Users can still obtain the data through downloadable files on the ED’s website, but we include them in our portal for easier accessibility.
Key Differences Between the NAS and Section 117 Databases:
|
ED Section 117 Database |
NAS Database |
|
Only funds $250K and above |
No funding threshold |
|
Donor names rarely provided |
Donor names almost always provided |
|
Purpose of gift rarely provided |
Purpose of gift almost always provided |
Section 117 of the Higher Education Act only requires universities to report foreign funds with monetary value greater than or equal to $250,000 in a calendar year. Our database reports funds that are as small as $1 for many universities, and for those where we are limited by a threshold, our thresholds are typically much lower ($50,000 or $100,000, most commonly). We also provide donor names and describe the purpose of the funds for many universities in our database.
How to Use:
Users can filter results based on country of origin, donor, school, transaction type, and data source. Users can also select the number of variables that appear on the database by clicking the “Columns” button, and selecting which variables they’d like to see on the webpage.
Users can access the foreign funds data in two ways. The first is by using our online portal – this is best for searching for individual donations. Viewers can also download the entire database to conduct data analyses. Download buttons are found at the top left corner of the database. One spreadsheet contains items the ED’s database. The second spreadsheet contains all items obtained by the NAS.
Limitations:
The Section 117 and NAS datasets should generally be analyzed separately. We cannot guarantee comparability between the two datasets due to reporting restrictions the NAS encountered when obtaining information. Combining data from Section 117 and NAS will result in duplicate amounts, as some funds will appear in both. Removing these duplicates is generally not possible to do at scale, because the way that universities subdivide their contract payments or calculate payment amounts may differ across the databases.
The NAS database represents our best attempt to obtain more complete information on foreign funds at public universities, and it is, to our knowledge, the only data source of its kind that goes beyond the ED’s database. However, due to differing state public records laws and university record retention practices, we cannot guarantee complete coverage of all foreign funds to universities in our database, particularly in earlier years.
1 Some of these variables will only appear if users download the entire file.
2 A small number of institutions in our database do not have an OPEID, because they are state agencies that belong to a university system rather than universities. Examples include Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) and Texas A&M Agrilife Research.
3 Most universities do not report such an identifier. For those that do, we have retained the identifier, unedited, for reference.
4 We have made some edits to this variable relative to what the universities report to improve consistency across the different data sources. For instance, when a corporation is the source of funds, we attempt to identify the country where its ultimate parent is headquartered and use this as the country of origin. However, this was not possible to do for all donations in our database, and we therefore recommend that 1) users interpret this variable in the context of the donor name to obtain a fuller picture of the donation’s origin, and 2) users exercise caution in interpreting this variable when the donor name is not present or is ambiguous.
5 “Contracts” include both research grants to faculty and contracts with the university administration, such as for the operation of a foreign branch campus. “Gifts” are funds from a donor that may be restricted, but are not tied to a specific project. Student tuition payments may originate from individual students and families or they may be paid by foreign organizations on behalf of foreign students. Note that the ED does not use the same transaction types as we do in our database. The most important difference is that they do not specify when payments are for student tuition; usually they are described as “restricted contracts.”
6 Section 117 Foreign Gift and Contract Data, Office of Federal Student Aid, U.S. Department of Education, https://fsapartners.ed.gov/knowledge-center/topics/section-117-foreign-gift-and-contract-reporting/section-117-foreign-gift-and-contract-data.
Photo by Giorgio Trovato on Unsplash
