Lobbying by academic institutions has skyrocketed in recent years, as colleges and universities have discovered that spending a few hundred thousand dollars on a powerful Washington lobbyist can yield millions of dollars in taxpayer-funded pork-barrel earmarks to study the cultivation of shiitake mushrooms, horseshoe crabs, and “dentistry outreach.” …
USA Today reported recently that “higher-education institutions spent at least $75 million in 2005 on lobbying to win grants and influence policy.” And the schools represented in the 2007 NCAA Tournament are certainly no strangers to lobbying Congress, having spent more than $85.7 million doing so since 1998.
Attached are the 65 NCAA Tournament schools ranked not by their RPI ratings or their regional seedings, but by how much money they and their associated school systems have spent lobbying Congress between 1998 and 2006, as reported in lobbying disclosure forms.
Phil Kerpen has more here.