US Export Controls Compliance Practices Benchmarks for Higher Education

21 colleges participated in this study which looks closely at how colleges and universities are complying with U.S. export control regulations and related strictures. The study presents detailed data on staffing, budgets, spending on information, legal services and conferences, use of government and private sector resources and consultants, and other facets of the efforts by colleges in the United States to comply with U.S, export control regulations that seek to control the outflow of critical technologies, particularly those with a military or dual use application. Among other issues covered: experience of hacking attacks on data subject to export controls, controls on foreign students and scholars, restrictions on information dissemination, interface with the US government export control bureaucracy, development of risk assessment reports and much more. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: •Colleges named as models for others in export control compliance practices include MIT, Stanford, Georgia Tech and Virginia Tech, which were named multiple times.•Institutions in the sample devoted a considerable amount of staff time to export controls; a mean of 1,560 staff hours and a median of 1,850. •27.27% of the organizations sampled have used an outside attorney for any issue involving export controls in the past year; 33.33% of research universities had done so.•Only 4.5% of organizations sampled have made their own training videos about export controls compliance. •A mean of 86.05% and a median of 95% of the research performed by the colleges sampled falls under the “Fundamental Research” exclusion which excludes it from the purview of export controls.