MU announces launch of MizzouForward, largest investment in university history
MU expects the transformation of the university to take 10 years.
I haven’t seen this talked about on the board so I thought I’d bring it up. This is a big deal, folks. Biggest investment in research in school history. $1.5B over 10 years. And this is on top of us already building the $200M NextGen Precision Health Research Institute next to the University Hospital. I’ve talked about this before, but I’ll spell it out again so that people can understand the context. Mizzou is grandfathered in as an AAU school. The AAU is supposed to be the 65 or so top research universities in North America. But actually Mizzou had fallen back in the rankings quite a bit. They were in the low 90s, which put us on par with schools like Mississippi State, Oregon State, Tennessee, Temple, and the University of Hawaii. Not much better than Nebraska, and Nebraska got kicked out of the AAU.
In the last few years, President Choi has made it a priority to improve those numbers. As of now we’re up to about $355 million per year in research. That should be enough to get us into the high 70s in the next rankings, and similar to schools like kansas, Oklahoma, Florida State, Iowa State, and Washington State. Still below almost all of the AAU but at least we’re getting closer.
So we’re going to be investing an average of $150M per year into research for the next 10 years. That’s a lot. If that translates into an additional $100 million per year in research, all of sudden we’re ranked in the 50s and close to schools like the University of Georgia, UC Irvine, and Case Western. That would be pretty good.
But with that kind of investment, it might mean even more than that. If we add $150-200M per year to our research totals, all of a sudden we’re a top 50 institution and up there with Colorado, Iowa, Virginia Tech, Utah, maybe even Virginia and Rutgers and Purdue. It seems like that’s where this might be headed. Again, like I said, it’s a big deal.
When it’s all said and done in 10 years I think it’s likely Mizzou will be solidly the 5th best research institution in the SEC after Vanderbilt, Florida, Texas, and Texas A&M.
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