Fact Book : AFIT Research, Cost and Benefit

Data are presented on the cost and on the benefits of research performed by the graduate students and faculty of the resident schools of the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) at Wright Patterson AFB, Ohio (WPAFB). Costs are calculated by allocating direct and indirect costs of operation to the research function. Research costs per student year for 1996 were found to be $17,809. This is benchmarked against data from the American Society for Engineering Education's Annual Directory of Engineering Graduate Studies and Research where the average of 353 institutions' spending for research per student year was found to be an almost identical $17,840. Benefits were measured from an analysis of seven years (1990-1996) of research customer responses to a research assessment form sent to all research sponsors. Both quantitative and qualitative measures of research benefits were extracted from the responses. Quantitative responses for the estimated contract cost of the research averaged $99,182 per MS thesis and $181,000 per Ph.D. dissertation. The qualitative measure of benefits consists of comments of research sponsors about the finished research. Over 100 of these comments are presented in the Appendices. These comments, taken as a whole, may be a better measure of benefit than the quantitative dollar numbers.Air Force Inst of Tech Wright-Pattersonafb Oh School of Engineering is the author of 'Fact Book : AFIT Research, Cost and Benefit', published 1997 under ISBN 9781423580478 and ISBN 1423580478.