In case you missed it, the midterm elections were on Tuesday, resulting in Republicans taking control of Congress, several new governors, and five states endorsing minimum wage increases.

Federal funds for science and engineering at American universities grew steadily from 2001 to 2008, jumped in 2009 and 2010 due to the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA), and more or less returned to its original trajectory in 2011, according to survey data from the National Science Foundation (NSF). Federal S&E funding in most states followed a similar pattern. A few states, including Minnesota and Delaware, managed to sustain their level of federal S&E support after the Recovery Act funds ceased.

Over the last several years, universities have been forced to reimagine ways that they engage with alumni beyond the traditional method of fundraising via alumni donations. These universities and their alumni associations want to increase alumni involvement and facilitate interactions between their high-achieving alumni, faculty, and students. Over this same time span, many universities have increased the size and scope of their entrepreneurship curricula and degree programs.

In a new report, the Ohio Board of Regents highlights promising policies to build more competitive innovation economies by tapping into the skills, knowledge and entrepreneurship of women, African-Americans, rural residents and other underrepresented populations.

Over the last couple weeks, governors in Arkansas and Mississippi presented budgets to their stage legislature. In Arkansas, term-limited Gov. Mike Beebe presented two budget proposals for the 2015-17 biennial budget to state lawmakers. However, Gov.-elect Asa Hutchison also will present a budget to the legislature that may differ from Gov. Beebe’s proposal and potentially impact funding for state agencies due to a proposed $100 million individual income tax cut. Mississippi Gov.

President Obama recently announced that the University of Tennessee was awarded the $259 million Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation (IACMI). The U.S. Department of Energy will commit $70 million to support the project with the remaining $189 million coming from IACMI partners including $15 million from the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development.

Pennsylvania’s largest universities by student population, Penn State and Temple University, both announced plans this week to make a concerted investment in their respective innovation ecosystems. Pennsylvania State University (PSU) President Eric Barron announced $30 million in new investments for economic development and student career students, while Temple University and Ben Franklin Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania established a new startup accelerator to assist university ventures.

Underrepresented minorities' share of  Science and Engineering (S&E) bachelor's and master's degrees has been rising since 1993, but their share of doctorates in these fields has flattened at about 7 percent from 2002 to 2012, according to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering: 2015 report.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) was appropriated $7.2 billion in FY14 (not including mandatory accounts) of which over $6.8 billion (nearly 95 percent of NSF’s total appropriations) was used to support research and education awards. Over 1,800 institutions of higher education and other organizations received funding from NSF including 11,000 competitively reviewed awards according to a report released by the NSF.  Other highlights include:

The Signature Report, an annual report on college completion conducted by researchers at the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center and Indiana University’s Project on Academic Success, identifies six-year student success outcomes and college completion rates by state for the cohort that began post-secondary education in fall 2008.

One hundred Twenty-five  impact investors worldwide reported plans to increase impact investing commitments by 19 percent in 2014, from 10.6 billion in 2013 to 12.7 billion in 2014, according to a J.P. Morgan-Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) info brief – Impactbase Snapshot: An Analysis of 300+ Impact Investing Funds. The report provides an overview of over 300 funds operating across three key themes: geographic focus, asset class type, and target impact theme.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is relaunching its advocacy agenda to create a more flexible, personalized, affordable and clear U.S. postsecondary education system. At the center of this agenda will be an effort to collect better metrics on student and institutional performance and to extend finance and financial aid options for lower income students.

Over the last couple months, the San Francisco-based Uber, a mobile-app-based transportation network, announced partnerships with institutions of higher education in the Northeast. In February, Uber and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) launched a strategic partnership that includes the launch of the Uber Advanced Technologies Center, a Pittsburgh-based research laboratory to advance Uber’s mission of bringing safe, reliable transportation to everyone, everywhere.

Earlier this year, the University of Washington (UW) relaunched its technology commercialization office as CoMotion, an entrepreneurial hub and makerspace. In doing so, UW joined a growing number of universities that have opened up their technology transfer operations to approaches inspired by the tech startup scene. The transformations of the University of Pennsylvania, Wake Forest, Tufts University and UCLA recently were profiled in Nature Biotechnology.

Working groups at The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and The Association of American Universities (AAU), two membership organizations of higher education institutions, have released statements on the role of universities in managing intellectual property and technology transfer alongside their core missions and interest in maximizing public benefit.

Academic institutions throughout the nation are committing themselves to the Maker movement, with the hopes of empowering a culture on their campus that promotes student confidence, STEM education, and hands-on creativity, according to a recent report by the MakeSchools Higher Education Alliance. Created in response to the Obama administration’s activities around Maker spaces, such as

In recent years, academic researchers have focused on trying to identify the characteristics that could make someone a potentially successful founder of a startup. However, there has been limited research on the characteristic of the individuals who join these founders as early employees to help them develop and commercialize innovative new products and services.

With place-based policies for free higher education in place at the local level for years, recent developments have begun to apply these programs on a grander scale. This month, Oregon became the second state to provide free community-college to its citizens, while a team of congressional Democrats introduced a proposal to move forward with President Obama’s plan for free community-college nationally.

In FY13, federal agencies obligated $29 billion to 995 academic institutions for science and engineering (S&E) activities, according to a recent National Science Foundation (NSF) InfoBrief. The FY13 federal obligation represented a 6 percent decrease in current dollars from the $31 billion that federal agencies obligated to 1,073 academic institutions in FY12 – the third year in a row of declining S&E funding to academic institutions.

In FY 2013, the federal government obligated $25.9 billion for science and engineering research and development (S&E R&D) at colleges and universities, a decrease of $1.6 billion from FY 2012 (5.7 percent). Eight states (California, New York, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Texas, North Carolina, and Illinois) each received more than $1 billion in funding during FY 2013, though each state also experienced a decrease from their FY 2012 total.

Forty-one states are spending less per student than before the 2008 recession, according to a recent study from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. As a result, more of the burden of higher education costs is being passed on to students, putting college out of reach for many. With state budgets still tight, many states are experimenting with new ways to make a college education accessible to all students.

While there has been a significant amount of focus on identifying and cultivating academic entrepreneurs, two recent studies indicate that the environmental factors are equally important in the commercialization of academic research. These studies find that the commercialization approach of the tech transfer offices (TTOs) and institutional characteristics were vital in the success of academic research commercialization.

Over the last month, several universities have announced new initiatives to support entrepreneurship among faculty, students, alumni, and the community that surrounds them. These efforts focus on providing individual and teams of entrepreneurs with access to capital, education, and other resources. In an effort to reshape their entrepreneurial ecosystem, Princeton University released a new report to guide the university’s entrepreneurial education and support efforts. 

On December 4, the Canadian government revealed their national Science and Technology (S&T) Strategy – Seizing Canada's Moment: Moving Forward in Science, Technology and Innovation 2014.  An update to the original report released in 2007, the S&T strategy identifies five priority research areas for federal support over the next seven years: environment and agriculture; health and life sciences; natural resources and energy; information and communications technology; and, advanced manufacturing.

A total of $30.8 billion for science and engineering (S&E) was given by federal agencies to 1,073 academic institutions across the United States in FY 2012, according to new research from the National Science Foundation. Although these obligations are 2 percent less than they were the year before, commitments to science and engineering increased more than 9 percent from 2007 to 2012. During that same time, per capita commitments to academic S&E decreased 7 percent.