Quick questions for anyone knowledgable about such things...I keep seeing articles state the following:

"The bill makes Rowan a research university, a designation that allows for more funding..."

1. I don't understand how a state can simply "designate" a school as a research university. Isn't this simply up to the BoG/BoT/BofWhatever to do research and then become, via their level of research activity, a research university? Doesn't Rowan already conduct research? Does Rutgers-Camden really do significantly more research then Rowan, even though technically Rutgers-Camden is part of a "research university?"

2. What is this stuff about "allowing for more funding?" I looked up what was budgeted for FY2013 for Rutgers, Rowan, and TCNJ and there is actually not that big of a difference in budgeted appropriations to colleges per student. Rowan does appear to get less per student then Rutgers, but I don't think its related to whether they are a "research university" or not. Rutgers gets around 8400 per student, TCNJ gets around 8300 per student, Rowan gets around 7600 per student. The only unversity that seems to get absurdly high appropriations per student is UMDNJ at roughly 51k per student (yes that's right, the appropriation to UMDNJ is nearly 365 million and, at least according to wikipedia, they only have 7182 students), but I am assuming UMDNJ is weird because they include University Hospital (although how strange would it be if they include Hospital Support for UMDNJ under the "education budget" each year...maybe that is why Newark is so afraid of losing UMDNJ).