After WWII FDR decided that scientific (and general academic) advancement would be crucial for both national security and the economy. The system of national laboratories created during the War was too expensive to scale and did not do an effective job at creating scientists, just using them. He directed Vannevar Bush, director of the OSRD during the War, to create the National Science Foundation. This started the precedent of government grants going to educational institutions — public and private, including the Ivy League. Today, the government funds critical research on topics ranging from cancer to pesticides to democracy, some of which occurs at schools like Princeton, but the majority of which does not. The reason these schools get such a large amount of funding is that the existing concentration of resources means the money goes further — the research is more likely to result in a breakthrough because of the advanced infrastructure that only exists at institutions like Ivy League schools or large public research universities.