The Looming Decline of the Public Research University
washingtonmonthly.com
washingtonmonthly.com
The university system in the US is the envy of the world right now. But US universities are degrading on several fronts, some internal (rising tuition which drives out smart students from less well off families, most evident now in law schools) and some external (cuts in government funding, most evident in Wisconsin GOP donor attacks on universities and public education more generally[1].)
There are some posts below from students who say they don't see much going wrong. Yes, they don't see much going wrong yet. But the underpinnings of universities are being eroded.
Research funding is harder to get. NIH and NSF budgets are down 20-30% in real dollars in the past two decades. Meanwhile schools are expanding and hiring more faculty and staff that are supposed to obtain their salaries from NIH and NSF. At the same time the long-held commitment to educating the best students is fading [2].
[1] "Hacked records show Bradley Foundation taking its conservative Wisconsin model national" https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2017/5/5/hacked-records-s...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-failing-... "If you think those claims sting, consider Tamanaha’s argument that law school effectively transfers money from students to relatively well-to-do professors, via student-loan debt — much of which is ultimately guaranteed by federal taxpayers who are generally not as well-off as the typical law professor.
Law school faculties are also bastions of liberal politics, and this irony is not lost on Tamanaha, who accuses the professoriate of not only enriching itself but also erecting de facto barriers to upward social mobility and true public-service law practice, all in the name of “academic freedom” and other abstractions."
Research should never be funded by tuition anyway. That research is a public good, the burden for funding it should not be placed on the backs of the nations youth, who have to in turn finance that tuition with debt.
It's a shame that one political party in this country has taken to believing that all of the world's problems can be solved with lower taxes (not low taxes, lowER taxes). Externalities and public goods do not exist.
I don't see how your interpretation is based in anything other than wishful thinking.
Free education doesn't mean that everyone has a college degree. It means that everyone who chooses to study for a college degree has the opportunity to obtain one.
Most colleges and universities in the USA were non-profit, until the 1970's. Everyone didn't have a college degree back then.
Finally, as an aside- it's a bit problematic to measure the value of a college degree just by monetary gains alone. Job satisfaction is at least as important and probably more.
This is pretty much equivalent to how increasing the amount of investment in any area can lead to both productive investment (e.g. better roads where they're really needed) and unproductive investment (the stereotypical "bridge to nowhere", though usually it's a bit more subtle than that).
There are two actual empirical questions here:
1) Are there ways that universities can spend extra money productively, from the point of view of society?
2) Are they actually doing it?
I don't know of good studies on the former, offhand. For the latter, as far as I can tell, the answer is "no": increased funding in the recent past has almost entirely funneled into making the lives of college students ritzier and increasing the number and salaries of administrative staff at all levels. And this matches my understanding of the incentive structures involved. As a simple example, parents and students who feel like they're paying a large amount of money demand better service for it (nicer dorms, better food, etc)....
I believe that increasing government investment in education without implementing any brake on the tendency to simply misuse the investment on the part of the colleges is not going to improve actual outcomes for students much in general. It may (or may not, depending on how the money gets used) improve things on the margin a bit for poor people. It will _definitely_ increase the price tab for taxpayers (including those same poor people). Weighing the overall societal benefits is hard to judge. As in many cases, people agree that there is a point of diminishing, or vanishing returns, but disagree on where that point is.
But in general, if we agree there is such a point, we should be trying to figure out whether we've reached it or not. We should also be trying to figure out how to move that point around, e.g. by abovementioned brakes on the misuse of extra investment.
There are, of course, hard questions about how such a brake could be implemented. It could be done via direct government regulation, but I expect this to get a significant amount of pushback _and_ increase the number of adminstrative positions needed to deal with it, somewhat contributing to the problem. It could be done via changes to the incentives universities have, but it's not entirely clear how to effect those. We should strongly consider experimenting with "X percent of future income over Y years" funding models instead of the "pay us now and it's your problem how to raise the money". I say this especially in light of data like http://www.nber.org/papers/w23888 that indicates that this approach _increases_ access for disadvantaged students. Of course there are still incentive problems here, especially if you feel that the point of college is not just to increase salaries.
Which is all to say that there are some hard questions here, and research and experimentation is desperately needed. Anyone claiming that "we just need to increase government spending on higher education without changing anything else" or "we should just decrease government spending on higher education without changing anything else" is likely wrong. So is anyone claiming "we should just keep things as they are", because I believe the system is fundamentally broken and getting more so.
I don't even think research should be coupled to the universities the way it currently is. From what I've seen it ends up being somewhat of a mess. Seeing what goes on there - for example, how grad students are treated - has made me doubt the ability of most universities to effectively manage and oversee research labs.
It's also adds one more thing to the odd stitched together thing we end up calling a university. It's a certification program/4-year summer camp/undergrad education center/research institute/cultural center/professional training center/sports franchise/etc.
Treating researchers as students is just the beginning.
However, it's pretty challenging to see how it could work. For one thing, a lot of the best researchers are also the best ones to teach their subject or topic (and relatively fewer talented people want to teach alone without doing any research). For another, the grad school system makes sense because you need training to do research, and that training often comes while you're also learning and taking classes, and it makes sense that you receive that training from the most experienced researchers (currently, professors). Finally, having research sit within a larger university institution makes it less fragile to economic or political shocks.
Coupling of research and university in order to protect research against financial/political shocks does seem to have some merit. But I think we have to examine the costs. For example, in my department one of the professors has a poster that reads what is expected of their time commitment: 30% of their time devoted to service, 70% to teaching, and 100% to research. If the reaserch is that important to us, shouldn't it be done by someone who can spend all their time thinking about it?
Almost all research is funded through grants.
> "It's a shame that one political party in this country has taken to believing that all of the world's problems can be solved with lower taxes (not low taxes, lowER taxes)"
We have a budget problem, most of which is due to entitlements and it cannot be resolved through increased income through taxes. maybe it can be solved through higher taxes due to people doing more things, but not higher overall taxes.
my numbers are old, but they should be in ball park. if you took all the money off the rich (1 million$+ nw) in the entire world (not just US), its somewhere around 7 trillion $.
- Lets ignore the fact that they do pay the lions share of tax revenue, and that revenue would now be gone an the 99% would have to take on that burden - Lets further ignore their wealth is shared, as in if zuckerberg sold all of facebooks stock, Billy G would lose net worth because he owns facebook stock and the laws of suply and demand would dictate a lower price.
that 7 trillion would pay our deficit for only 16 years, and wouldn't even bring the total debt down to when Obama was elected president.
I dont agree that research spending should be cut, but I sort of get why its facing the axe. Universities (on the administrative level) aren't apolitical anymore, and increasingly neither is their research.
One example was that I noticed how well diabetes overlapped with obesity rates on the map. The areas that did not overlap did overlap with another thing: excessive alcohol consumption. When I brought it up in the lab, it was immediately dismissed - I dont disagree with the hyps, but science means looking into things not going by personal opinion. As an experiment, I showed the same trend to another group, but I told them the non-overlapping region was increased diabetes rates, and that the other factor was soda consumption. This drew immediate attention, they were ready to write grant proposals to NSF and NIH in hopes that this can be used to broaden soda taxes across the country.
I do think its a shame that the current president is focusing on so many things other than getting tech companies to bring their revenues 'home' to be taxed. I think that would benefit everyone. But when I look at whats going on, I dont agree with it, but I do get it.
You repeat yourself. A public good is a positive externality, in that it benefits third-parties.
Kind of weird how so much of republican policy seems to boil down to "externalities don't exist".
It mostly isn't.
Not really. It's built on a unsustainable model of student debt. This bomb has been building for generations and when it goes off who knows what it will wipe out.
Meanwhile, a lot of public universities have dipped in quality and don't seem as focused on education. Classes are run by adjunct professors or grad students while the students pay far more than other students in other counties.
The massive increase in price and decrease in quality will eventually cause some kind of reaction--probably either fewer people going to college or colleges being forced to cut tuition to keep their current numbers.
Film school, med school and law school not so much.
Cost of attendance paying in state tuition is $24,000 to $28,000 depending on which web site you get your data from. How is a full-time student going to pay that without going into debt?
http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl...
One is they get their grants from the government, and conservatives believe the government is awful for most things, and research instead be done by private corporations.
The other reason is that conservatives see universities as hotbeds of athiest, radical left ideology, and so basically want to shut them down. In fact, one of the founding books of the modern conservative movement is William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale.
That's conservative, but not particularly partisan. Our schools are in trouble and we're shooting the messenger.
You might be surprised to learn that most conservatives, just like liberals, send their kids to Universities and pay a lot of money each year to do it.
Anyway, as for a research focus, I think there's disagreement on the conservative side over that issue. I think what most concerns them is waste (not actually getting research despite spending so much money on it) and ideological capture. When University leadership all shares the same political beliefs they will sometimes use the research money they're given to fund very political projects.
I think it's entirely rational to want to stop funding a project which seeks to undermine everything you believe in.
A solution would be to refocus on real research and seek ideological diversity.
This seems entirely rational to me. A private corporation must strive to meet real human needs in order to survive. Capital tends to flow towards those who are best able to convert it into happiness for other human beings. Public institutions have no such constraint. Logically, one would conclude that they would be less efficient at converting capital into happiness for other human beings.
Is there any evidence of which I should be aware which supports the proposition that publicly funded research outperforms privately funded research?
You most probably can't. The reason is that private corporations have a very short-term outlook and are (understandably) looking for short-term returns.
Academics aren't incentivized by ROI. Instead, they want intellectual distinction and recognition, and pursue problems if they are perceived to be intellectually curious or may have a large impact on society.
Sometimes the actual work that is being done can overlap, but underneath the motivations are completely different, and each have their own pros and cons. We need both.
+ The founders retain a lot of control via the company stock structure, are nerds, and seemingly want to recreate a Bell Labs style culture. + Doing crazy science keeps up their brand as a tech thought leader current, even though 95% of their revenue comes from a pretty simple set of products that about 20 years old. This helps them recruit the best and brightest.
Doing this kind of research also gives them a plausible potential growth story to sell to the Street. So it's not that commerce doesn't cross their mind, but it's not in the short-term sense that a lot of people think of it as. I'm not opposed to university research, I just think people underweight the corporate side's contributions.
This plays out plenty at Google. They make a big splash investing in a speculative technology, devote a huge team to it for a year or two, then dump it to move on to the next big thing. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, but it's not the same as academia.
Google may be top “freedom of research” today but it’s a private property I have no influence or stake whatsoever; one day they take a u-turn and “spring clean” all.
I can’t trust a couple guys just because “they’re nerds”, that’s not a long enough guarantee. You actually used Bell Labs as an example... is it still as prominent today as it was? Why not?
Let me break to you the hard news: As a citizen you have basically zero influence over the research direction that the government TLAs engage in. Those decisions are made through elections which are determined by things like "who can we scare into thinking they'll cause abortions to happen across the land". If a candidate who had a proven track record of funding science wrote the Patriot act, you wouldn't vote for him, would you? (True story). It's even worse in the EU, since the commissioners are not elected. Oh and the kicker is that in the past three decades, those people who hate abortions and deny global warming have a better track record of funding science than the other tribe.
If you really want to have agency, you would be donating to a nonprofit science research organization.
I don’t think there’s a solution that doesn’t include reevaluating the idea of public commons, in a world without there’s absolutely no reason to spend a dime outside of corporate subsidy
State universities are great, but they're not where the lion's share of Nobel-caliber research is done. In the US, Private schools lead 10:1 in the Nobel race: (https://www.bestmastersprograms.org/50-universities-with-the...).
Exactly! That's why we need to nationalize the Ivy League.
I once worked on a Google R&D project that got well-known in some circles. Google cut the funding without warning and I eventually had to find a new job.
They do have basic research too, into topics that Google or SpaceX wouldn't do (see eg. http://math.mit.edu/research/pure/index.php)
I'm not sure if the difference is meaningful, there's essential applied research too that private companies wouldn't do. Like cosmology.
It's hard to see how we would have gotten quantum computers without decades of enormous public budgets for basically aimless basic research.
Before that: Xerox and AT&T. Google did too at first with their car are robotics venture s.
Admittedly sparse pickings...
Still, as far as I know, neither MS nor IBM funds truly basic research without considering some kind of potential return.
On the other hand, the NSF doesn't consider ROI at all because it's funded by us taxpayers.
Hmm, that’s a pretty strong statement, can you provide evidence it’s an observable phenomenon - a natural law - rather than an initial hypothesis, a postulate?
Also, a bunch of people have good access to capital just because who luck chose as their parents.
My experience in private corporations tells me that they tend to be incredibly inefficient as well. So I see the logic behind what you're saying, but I think you're describing something other than reality. The evidence I see points to efficiency not being correlated between public and private, but more between people who give a fuck and people who don't.
Where would society be without the basic research that was done over the last century?
AT&T has 8 Nobel prizes under its belt. At least three are fundamental science:
1937: Clinton J. Davisson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics for demonstrating the wave nature of matter.
1978: Arno A. Penzias and Robert W. Wilson shared the Nobel Prize in Physics. Penzias and Wilson were cited for their discovering cosmic microwave background radiation, a nearly uniform glow that fills the Universe in the microwave band of the radio spectrum.
1998: Horst Störmer, Robert Laughlin, and Daniel Tsui, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering and explaining the fractional quantum Hall effect.
I just can't think of any company comparable now. By the time of that first Nobel Prize in 1937, AT&T had basically had its monopoly for 30-50 years depending on exactly where you start counting, and it would continue to maintain it for nearly another 50.
I'm not sure what you mean by limit, could you elaborate?
Re AT&T - I don't see how that indicates private companies are good for getting basic research done in general.
True. But it is evidence against the proposition that basic research can only be done in public institutions. Which organizational form is better at doing it seems to be an open question.
If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is of value, I would presume that private corporations would step forward to meet those needs if public institutions were not doing so.
I never made that claim.
> If the basic research in question has applications that potentially meet real human needs and thus is of value, I would presume that private corporations would step forward to meet those needs if public institutions were not doing so
That is nonsense. The whole thing about basic research is that it's generally very difficult to predict whether any particular kind of basic research is going to bear fruit and what sorts of applications it will have. You can't predict well, in advance. History shows this pretty clearly. You have to make a lot of diversified bets. There will be rare but massively profitable (long term) payoffs.
Discovering Quantum Mechanics has had huge benefits for society but no one could have predicted them in advance. And think of how much accumulated research was required over the years to lead to it, where it couldn't have been predicted that they'd lead to QM and its applications.
Private corporations knowingly caused the opioid epidemic to make money.
Tell me how mass murder "meets real human needs."
It meets the human need to relieve pain.
I did not mean to imply that it always does so in a moral way.
Clearly it does not.
>I believe Buckley is considered one of the really important neo-conservatives.
Actually, the term "neo-conservativism" originally referred to people like Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol who had originally been leftists, and switched to conservativism in the 60's.
Later it also came to include the idealistic hawks who supported the invasion of Iran and other aggressive foreign affairs policies. See, for instance, the book Present Dangers edited by William Kristol and Robert Kagan.
https://www.aaas.org/news/science-and-technology-funding-und...
It is best to think of the problem as the inability of the executive branch to work with Congress. This is not a result of the “ascent of the conservative political movement” as you call it. It is simply a result of a polarized political environment, both by left wingers (Obama) or right wingers (Trump). Both made it a point to leave the other side out in the cold after winning (remember Schumer saying that Dems passing Healthcare alone was a strategic mistake?)
We don’t have to let political persuasion blind us from reality of where we are since Obama won the first time: a divided country.
https://www.google.com/amp/thehill.com/policy/healthcare/225...
This article exposes much that I've been ignorant to as an undergrad, but it feels to blow some issues out of proportion. Sure, we don't nearly have as much funding as private universities, but that's par for the course for a public university which offers cheap tuition for local students, and is generous with its scholarships.
And many educated students leave for "greener pastures" upon graduation, but that also feels natural to me. Most students who come here are from Ohio, and so once they get that diploma, it opens doors in the entire country which they are hungry to pursue.
Maybe I'm just a bit too thick to see the apocalypse the author is foretelling.
[1] http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/home_and_garden/2016... [2] https://www.thelantern.com/2016/02/new-residence-halls-set-f...
There's all kind of post hoc explanations for why this historically contingent organizational structure is really super optimal and the best of all ways of setting things up, but frankly they aren't very convincing. Probably the least bad is the notion that this structure is the only politically palatable way to subsidize the intellectual output of arts and many of the social science. But even there, I'm not wholly convinced.
*Actually more than two. There's also semi-pro sports teams among other things.
Disagree. The best place for undergrads to get a top-notch education is where they have the opportunity to work with or even around top-notch researchers and people at the top of their fields. Yes, many faculty don't spend that much time with undergrads, but they spend some. And they spend time with grad students who spend time with undergrads. This is the best way we know how to organize great teaching for undergrads.
Isn´t the fact that colleges are places part of the problem to begin with?
In the non-US place where I had my tertiary education, the university was in the major metropolis (it had plenty of green and even a small river crossing it, but it was still in the city). I lived at home with my parents.
In the afternoons, I was able to go and attend "scientific initiation" classes at a nearby research institution that didn't issue undergraduate degrees but still had their researchers do some outreach. This at the cost of not taking an internship, which pretty much everyone else did, of course.
I'm not saying this is any kind of ideal model, but the research-vocational university isn't the singular model for contact with the research life (another alternative: internships in dedicated research institutions).
Of course, by refactoring the university, this... disrobes... the problem of funding research.
As someone who has spent time in both a low ranked university and a top 5 one, I cannot agree.
The curriculum is more demanding in the top 5 one, so if you get through it, you'd be more educated.
The quality of the instruction, though, was poorer.
What really does make a difference, though, is having highly motivated peers. They'll make a bigger difference in driving you to do your best than top faculty members will.
Would love to hear more :)
I'm also in the Pacific Northwest, so it seemed...appropriate.
We are really debating a line drawing exercise. Scholars have to teach Phd students because they are the only ones that know the material that phd students are learning. Even if a particular scholar or scholars in general are bad at pedagogy it doesn't matter, there's no other option. On the hand high school American history can be taught by people that aren't themselves historians. We can select people that are good at and like teaching instead of having no choice but to use the people whose passion is investing the marriage rituals of late 17th century puritan farmers.
My contention is that the vast majority of undergraduate coursework is on the high school American history side of the line. Those arguing on the other side don't generally argue that e.g. intro to partial differential equations -- a sophomore / junior level course for majors -- needs to be taught by someone publishing in the field of mathematics. That only someone on the cutting edge understands it well enough to teach it to others. Rather they make some rather mystical and anecdote driven claims about how such professors are inherently superior at imparting this knowledge than would be professors that were selected for, and spent their time honing, their skills in teaching rather than their skills in publishing.
It's a rather extraordinary claim that selecting for exactly the qualities we are looking for would produce inferior outcomes to selecting for some other tenuously related quality, so it requires a fair bit of evidence.
This is highly field dependent. I'm on the math faculty at a public research university. The bulk of research funding in mathematics comes from the NSF, which generally does not buy out teaching (so most of us have no choice but to teach a full load). Not saying this is a bad thing -- there are aspects of teaching I really enjoy -- but the statement above is not quite accurate for fields like mathematics. Similarly, most of our graduate students are TAs most of the time, except when they have an external fellowship or when their advisor happens to have a grant to support them.
I'm a tenured faculty member at one of the institutions discussed in the article, currently looking elsewhere for jobs. If I don't find an academic one, I'll probably leave and go into non-academic fields.
I have mixed feelings about the article, because I think the takeaway message is about right, and well-meaning, but there's a subtext that's completely problematic and lost, which is this:
The whole discussion in the article is about profit, and the loss of public [midwestern] university profits to other institutions. That is, the problem identified is in retention of profitable faculty: "midwestern universities are losing their most profitable faculty because they can't afford their salaries." Quality of research is equated with profit, grant dollars brought in, and so forth.
Why is this a problem? A number of reasons.
First and foremost, the cost and profit research brings in is not the same as quality. There's a number of studies showing that impact (itself a poor measure of quality, although sufficient) is only weakly related to grant funding. Lots of good research can be done on a minimal, if no budget, and assuming that grant dollars = research quality is wrong. It might be true for certain fields, where equipment costs, etc. are standard, but for other fields, like math, you don't need a huge budget.
The second problem is that by defining research quality in terms of profitability, you're feeding the problems that caused the hollowing out of midwestern public universities to begin with. The problem is not actually decreased public funding of universities, the problem is in the devaluing of research as a public benefit. The defunding is a secondary consequence of the devaluing, not the problem itself. Crippling tenure in Wisconsin, and threatening it in Iowa, are other consequences of this devaluing.
These discussions strike me as sort of stupid at some level, because those grants that are being brought in are federal grants, which means they are public. So what's really happening is that the states are saying "we don't want to support faculty doing research. If they can get money another way, let them."
If you want to fund research, there's basically four ways to do it:
A consumer can support a company or other institution directly, by purchasing goods or donating, or paying tuition, or whatever, which then funds research as part of its operations.
A consumer can support the researcher directly through kickstarter-like mechanisms or directly to the researcher (rare today but happens).
A citizen can provide taxes to the state which funds the researcher's salary, either at the university, or in another institution. This means the state is supporting the research.
A citizen can provide taxes to the federal government, which funds the researcher's salary. This means the federal government is supporting the research.
What's happened today is that the third option is being gutted. What we've done is essentially say that "research isn't valuable unless the researcher gets federal funds to do so, or is paid for by a private corporation."
I'm a very highly cited researcher, by many metrics, but I don't bring in much grant money by the nature of my research. So by the university's metrics I'm not valuable. Maybe that's reasonable, but to me I increasingly feel like something's hollow in these discussions.
I see administrators being quoted in this article and feel resentment, because I don't see them saying "see here, you need to give us money to support this wonderful research." What I see them saying is "see here, you need to give us money to pay the people who are bringing in money from elsewhere." What this does is feed the underlying problematic value assertion, which is that the research means nothing, it's the money. "We need money so we can make more money" is what they're actually saying.
Research isn't something that is easy to measure "profit" in. Rather, research is a lot more like the exploration of the unknown or sparsely known.
Discovery of a new process or physical law of nature could lead to more benefit than even a gold rush. Maybe we figure out how to actually make fusion work at small scale (economically). Maybe a new way of looking at atomic interactions allows for the creation of entirely new classes of devices across many categories; getting us closer to actual science fiction toys.
Without research, we probably won't get there, and it'll sure take a lot longer if we aren't trying.
Research can also be compared to efforts to break 'enemy messages' during a WWII. In some ways success was possible and that made victory much easier to achieve. In other ways it was either harder or didn't pan out; that didn't mean it was impossible, it just meant that it wasn't within reach of the general level of technology that existed at the time. The tools of today make those old techniques prone to even brute forcing, which means that problems that fail conventional searches today MAY be unlocked by future advances in other fields.
You never know if you don't try to look.
This has happened in federal republics: in the past states were more powerful and expected to bear a larger portion of the Public Good-producing apparatus. Then some stuff happens (maybe production is de-localized even if it remains intra-national; maybe states enter races-to-the-bottom in state taxes to attract industries, etc.) and only the federal government is able to deal with problems.
So that's probably orthogonal to research.
The basic problem: research broadly framed is a public good, like a lighthouse. But hey, math research is thoroughly public, theorems are all utterly equivalent to a small number of rules of metamathematics. OTOH drug research can often be access-controlled so it can be made profitable. This is the pure-applied spectrum, and all the innovative solutions are about having private actors pay for stuff at the margins in the applied end. For example: I work with symplectic numerical integrators, maybe Mathworks out of its enlightened self-interest should pay me so that even if the research comes out in papers it will be first on its MATLAB suite of engineering stuff. See?
Researchers are almost always faculty (yes, some places have research scientist type roles on staff).
If you were at my university, which is not so different from Ohio State, you would never meet me - save, perhaps, at the fast food places in the student union. I'm research faculty, and not only do I not teach undergrads, there isn't even an undergraduate program in my area - it's strictly graduate students.
And forgive me for saying this, but most undergraduates I do encounter are amazingly ignorant of the scope of the university, what it is their professors do, etc.
"The university this past year revamped the student living situation on north campus [1][2]. The university is expanding at a feverish pace because students want to come here; we are gaining recognition beyond being simply a football school and aspiring high school students are not considering OSU to be nearly the backup school it once was. Sure, it isn't as flashy to tell your relatives you go to OSU as opposed to MIT or Harvard, but it's not the disappointment most used to consider it to be."
Students are one of the few ways a state university now has to reliably bring in money, and as such, they have to compete for them. You are, in essence, the subject of a marketing campaign.
"This article exposes much that I've been ignorant to as an undergrad, but it feels to blow some issues out of proportion. Sure, we don't nearly have as much funding as private universities, but that's par for the course for a public university which offers cheap tuition for local students, and is generous with its scholarships."
One of the reasons tuition is rising, and the schools that have low tuition are under pressure, is that state and federal funding has dried up, so student tuition and fees are the only lever they have left. Many of these universities, even if they have managed to hold the line so far, are at the breaking point.
"Maybe I'm just a bit too thick to see the apocalypse the author is foretelling."
Universities have benefits beyond "Did we teach undergrads"? It's those benefits that are under strain.
The article feels a bit disingenuous to me because it compares funding for hugely popular private universities to those in flyover country. If the author could provide statistics for private universities in Ohio and Pennsylvania that supported the same trend, then I would see his thesis more clearly.
Very few things in America have been quite as good recently at convincing people without a lot of money to spend a ton of money on shit they don't need as the whole "look at our gym and amazing new dorms and beautiful new buildings" undergrad amenity wars.
>"Universities perform more than half of all basic research in America, and public research universities in particular account for nearly 60 percent of the $63.7 billion allocated annually by the federal government for research. That spending, in turn, produces more than 2,600 patents and 400 companies a year, according to the National Science Board."
The US Federal Government allocated funding that produces "2,600 patents and 400 companies a year"? Does revenue from those patents and companies not funnel into the University's endowments?
Or is this a case of where its the public's money when it comes to funding but private money when that funding produces successful patents and companies and profits? For instance the article mentions Gore-Tex and references, presumably the Mosaic Web Browser. Did profits from those not flow back into the schools? Is there something in their charger that prevents that?
Universities are also major employers and economic engines in their own right.
Further, would the private sector benefit from such crucial hard-research discoveries being public knowledge and thus open for all to benefit from? (Possibly in exchange for a requirement of a minimum number of workers in that field in this country, and an import tariff on products if they aren't locally employing? I could see extending mutual tariff free exchange status among other nations with similar public domain enriching efforts.)
This is another problem that boils down to short-sighted politicians voted in to cut spending everywhere and kill regulations. Maybe things were better when a group of elite New Yorkers controlled the entire media and the range of political discourse.
No, it's worse than that. It's not short-sighted politicians. It's politicians who are purchased by the very wealthy. Politicians who are selected for their desire to destroy public institutions to cut taxes on the very wealthy.
It's not that the politians are just stupid or feckless. They actually have bad intentions because they're paid off. Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Scott Pruitt at EPA are good examples of this kind of politician.
Once this country declines they'll just move somewhere else laughing all the way to the bank.
So why not pilfer the richest nation on earth for short term gain? Why support politicians that might not act in your interest? When things start going downhill it's off to Europe or Asia.
I do think that we've metrics-ed our way to forgetting that some things can be a good idea because we value them, not because they satisfy some tacitly accepted value of efficiency.
Old school leaders weren’t as transactional as the people running things today.
EDIT: exactly like the mortgage crisis went down
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/11/annual-aaup-s...
And it wasn't just absolute, it was relative to teacher/student ratios and tenured positions growth and educator wage increase.
"A Top-Heavy Administration? By DAVID H. HUBEL January 31, 2012 17 In 1958, Stephen Kuffler was invited to come from Johns Hopkins Medical School to Harvard Medical School to become a full professor in the Department of Pharmacology. He brought with him four post-doctoral fellows: Torsten Wiesel, Ed Furshpan, David Potter, and myself. Along with Ed Kravitz, we formed the nucleus that led to the founding of the Department of Neurobiology five years later.
When we arrived, Harvard Medical School was directed by one dean—George Parker Berry. He was assisted by a genius, Henry Meadow, who joined HMS in 1950 as executive secretary to the Committee on Research and Development. The two of them ran the whole school. Berry was grouchy and firm-handed and what he said was law.
....
you should see the list of FAS administrators. My printout runs to over 16 pages. I haven't counted up the various kinds of FAS deans, but the list dwarfs that of the Medical School. "
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2012/1/31/david-hubel-harv...
Which positions do you think could be eliminated or merged?
Many universities actually manage to lose money on federally funded research, as the amount of compliance work required to maintain grant funding actually outstrips the overhead rates.
And yes, I've seen the overhead rates that universities are charging lately, and I agree they're absurd. Yet somehow it's still not enough.
[1] Karen A. Holbrook and Paul R. Sanberg. Understanding the High Cost of Success in University Research. http://www.uh.edu/af/docs/IDC/TIarticle.pdf
Especially when one considers that overhead rates are also the things that fund faculty startup packages and capital improvements.
Professors take that pay cut for academic freedom, the ability to control their own lives and think independently, and to be part of an intellectual community.
It is common for academic medical doctors to earn two to three times less than doctors in private practice. (i.e. 50% to 33% of private practice physicians. For example, an intensivist can make $500k+ in some private hospitals and normally makes $200-250k in an academic setting.)
In the South at a second tier university, it amazes me how alive everything seems and how useful the research coming out of there is. I don't really see the decline. The growth and construction and hiring just goes on and on. Wouldn't be shocked if the financial situation of some states (Illinois, hello) would cause some major difficulties with publicly financing education, but is that going on throughout the country?
Certainly a danger going forward will be private companies that can far outpace anything academia offers in money, prestige, or mobility. The semi-closed, semi-open nature of the research teams at the bigger companies is confusing, in particular, but if they are disseminating that research, it's hard to argue the private route of research is especially worse than the public.
My personal favorite, about the medical school struggling to stay funded: "Well, why do we need a medical school?"...because we have a teaching hospital, and you can't really have a teaching and research hospital without a medical school. "Well, why do we need a hospital?"
And this was about one of the best medical schools in the country.
It's been constant growth for at least the last 10 years, so not sure where the funding differential is, what allows a smaller college to thrive, while bigger and more prestigious ones have financial concerns. To be fair, UTD does a fraction of the research of the bigger colleges, so maybe it doesn't come into play.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2017/02/0...
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/30/us/small-colleges-losing-...
http://college.usatoday.com/2017/02/24/for-many-small-colleg...
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/health-care-costs-consume-25-...
B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Afforda...: "The federal government paid 100% of the cost of Medicaid eligibility expansion in participating states in 2014, 2015, and 2016; and will pay 95% in 2017, 94% in 2018, 93% in 2019, and 90% in 2020 and all subsequent years."