The UW Madison fell one spot in the National Science Foundation's most recent rankings for money spent on research funding, even though it spent almost a million dollars more on research last year than it did the year before. Martin Cadwallader is the Vice Chancellor for research at the UW. He says even though the UW fell from third to fourth, it is one of few schools that have been consistently ranked in the top five for more than 20 years.

“I think University of Washington-Seattle moved above us and they had a particularly good return in terms of their stimulus funding and probably did a little bit better than us on that score," he says. "But like I say, there is always some movement each year."

Research at the UW accounted for more than a billion dollars of the $61 billion that US colleges and universities spent in 2011. The UW ranks fourth behind Johns Hopkins University, The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the University of Washington in Seattle.