Impact of funding allocation on physical therapist research productivity and DPT student graduates: an analysis using panel data

Financial support for institutional research is relatively stagnant, and thus institutions are likely to seek tuition revenue to offset the costs of research and teaching. It is likely that this has led to increases in tuition driven activities, and thus has limited research activities of academic physical therapy (PT) programs in particular. However, the relationships between sources of program revenue, the number of graduates from PT programs, and the scholarly production of PT faculty have not been studied. The purpose of this paper is to study the effects of types of funding—including research grants and tuition—on the number of physical therapy graduates from each program and the research productivity of physical therapy faculty. Data from 2008 to 2016 were utilized to perform a fixed-effects panel analysis. Panel models created predictions for the number of graduates and the number of peer-reviewed publications for programs from grant funding, annual tuition, and number of funded faculty members. In any given program, a 1% increase in annual tuition is associated with 24% more graduates per year, but a single percentage point increase in the mix of NIH grant funding over other funding types is associated with 8% fewer graduates, all else equal. For every 1% increase in annual tuition, a program can expect to have 41% fewer publications per year. Those institutions with higher numbers of graduates tended to have higher numbers of publications. Higher annual program tuition appears to be associated with both higher numbers of physical therapy graduates and lower levels of publications. Different funding sources have variable effects on degree production and scholarly productivity. Data are self-reported by programs on the Annual Accreditation Report, and cause and effect cannot be established through observational design.