...from around #225 to #85 since 2010. BYU is elite in so many areas, it's just that good and has been for a very long time.

But Utah is getting better. As I have said though, RESEARCH DOLLARS is a very bad and overall misleading measure. That's because SO MUCH of that money goes to maintaining incredibly expensive infrastructure tied to its graduate programs. This is true of many PAC and AAU institutions that have:

Hospitals
Clinics
Medical Grade Research Laboratories that are massively expensive.

Then add linear accelerators (nuclear and quantum physics) and infrastructure for operating particle or photonic/wave physics experimentation (Stanford, CAL) or air frame/wind tunnel labs (UCLA, UW) for experimentation and you are talking big bucks annually, but not necessarily more graduate personnel doing actual research or completing masters and doctoral programs. Money can be a massive false measuring stick.

Forbes recognizes that. It does not overly weight the importance of onsite research in these infrastructure weighty sciences vs linguistic anthology or field biology and geological research that costs so much less to degree a master's or doctoral candidate. It does not assume $100,000 costs in field research is less valuable than $1,500,000 spent moving a theoretical physics candidate through Stanford or Cal who work in massively expensive on site or related site labs. It does not assume that biologists studying medical metadata for a PhD at Utah that might cost $500,000 due to all its ties to medical facility operations of various types is more valuable than a BYU student at $50,000 cost that can do the exact same study of the same data. In the BYU case, the same level PhD comes from a zoology or biology lab where no a medical facilities are necessarily part of the baseline cost of that degree, just a good lab.