Koch University Funds: Return on Investment?

[ghost]

I found a dataset of the total Koch brothers contributions to US Universities, from 2005 to 2014.

I want to combine it possibly with some data on research output by said universities, or median student income, or median student indebtedness, most common areas of study, etc.

I'm curious to see what the connection behind the money could be, as some of the donations are quite hefty (max is $45 million) and others are not (min $1,000). So the question here is, why the huge differences, what are the differentiating factors, and what are they getting in return? TANSTAAFL

Also, I found a ton of analysis on the subject, but not much data besides the original set. Salon's article The Atlantic's article

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[gcgruen]

That sounds really promising! I think the most difficult thing will be to find consistent data to connect this dataset with.

To back up your hypothesis of them funding mainly conservatives, you could connect the university funding to electoral data for the counties that the university is in. When doing that, it would be esp interesting to me to see how the young age group students would be in have voted.

I would also be interested to see what research areas they are giving money to: Social science? Economics? Life science? If it's the latter (coming from that background) I'd be curious what kind of research is funded -- ie anti-climate-change?

[HarshaDevulapalli]

It would be also interesting to see - what kind of a state the university is in - a red or a blue state or a swing state. A flow diagram such as this here(https://www.ifu.com/knowtheflow/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/oil-flow-daily-lives.jpg) broken down - would be wonderful.

[ghost]

A preliminary look at how the contributions are distributed, only for total contributions greater than a million:

[jsoma]

From reading the Salon and Atlantic pieces, it seems like the big thing isn't necessarily what schools the money is going to, but more about the programs it's supporting. A grant to the Lede Program means something specific, while a grant listed as being for Columbia Journalism School could mean most anything.

Being able to say "these are the kinds of programs they're giving money to" is probably going to get you something a lot more targeted, since the point of them giving money is either 1) that really weird thing where they want information on students, but probably mostly 2) to have influence over economic programs. If you look at one of the documents mentioned by the Atlantic, you'll see they supported the "Initiative for Public Choice & Free Market" along with "Philosophy and Economic Theory Series." If you can find a place where they're contributing to something not economic it would be an interesting outlier.

If this is something you're really interested in I'm a-ok with it being a multi-week project! Otherwise you might go crazy reading all of those documents in such a short period of time :).

OR if you don't want to be married to this data forever and are fine standing on the shoulders of giants, if you scroll down on the dataset you'll find links like this that outline a lot of "important numbers" about the Koch influence. You can just visualize those numbers! They have them in text, but hey, wouldn't life be better if they were pretty graphics? It would probably be a combination of using that dataset + creating your own (small!) datasets from things mentioned in the reports. It'd be more of an exercise in Illustrator + getting matplotlib to do your bidding than digging deep deep into data.

[ghost]

Also this link @gcgruen recommended:

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0082131

[HarshaDevulapalli]

This is something you might want to look at :

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/613470e79eb64a5f9a4880996e0fd7c5/george-mason-university-becomes-favorite-charles-koch

It says, the reason GMU gets the money is that it is fed to the Mercatus Centre -"a free-market think tank that conducts research designed to educate the federal regulators and congressional staffers whose work on arcane, wonky policy can influence the direction of government."

[ghost]

So, I decided to look most closely at George Mason University, also-- I found all their tax returns for the relevant years, so I potentially have a lot more information on what money they receive, what portion of it comes from the Koch brothers, and what they spend that money on-- since they have to make it public. Also how much money they pay to board members and the names, lots of things to explore. I am choosing to copy/paste and fiddle with the data with regular expressions in a text editor, but I am also open to employing other strategies.

Questions to ask the data:

-Exactly how much quantifiable influence do the Koch brothers have, as a percentage of the total revenue for George Mason? Just how big is their seat at the table?

-What things do they spend all this money on? How much money do they have?

-Are there perhaps any changes, say in board members or otherwise, that have precipitated such a steep rise in donations from 2012 to 2014?

Questions for feedback:

-I'm terrible at picking colours, and I'm not sure an area graph is the best way to represent this. It's yearly amount of money donated, so it could be pretty boring pretty easily...

Planned visualizations: Would still like to compare this data to something different, like election data or maybe some indicator of conservative-ness, like amount of churches per capita, or something like that. I'm just focusing on Virginia, where George Mason is, so I could get pretty granular.

I haven't seen any visualizations at all in any of the articles I've read, though there certainly has been lots of research using this data.

[ghost]

Ángel Cabrera assumed the presidency of GMU in 2012. According to the tax returns, he got paid 625,957 in 2014 by the George Mason University Foundation. Yep, the one in my chart up there. Maybe I should look at how he's so lucky at getting the Koch brothers to give huge amounts of money to GMU, and what is so attractive about GMU to the Koch brothers, like here!

[playfairbot]

Closing pitch since story has been opened at #155