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Is the U.S. Losing Its Preeminence in Higher Education?
Abstract
The expansion of U.S. universities after World War II gained from the arrival of immigrant scientists and graduate students, the broadening of access to universities, and the development of military research and high technology industry. Since the 1980s, however, growth of scientific research in Europe and East Asia has exceeded that of the U.S., suggesting convergence in world science and engineering and a falling U.S. share. But the slowdown of U.S. publication rates in the late 1990s is a different matter, in that the rise of science elsewhere does not imply a U.S. slowdown in any obvious sense. Using a panel of U.S. universities, fields and years, evidence is found of a slowdown in the growth of resources. In turn, this has caused a deceleration in the growth of research output in public universities and university-fields falling into the middle 40 percent and bottom 40 percent of their disciplines. These developments can be traced to slower growth in tuition and state appropriations in public universities compared to revenue growth, including from endowment, in private universities.
... Until now, our understanding of the long-term development of global science production has been limited by available data. Empirical studies and bibliometric analyses have examined scientific publications as early as the 1970s (Schofer, 2004), but most have focused on the decades since 1980 (Adams, 2009;Adams, Black, Clemmons, & Stephan, 2005;Bornmann & Mutz, 2015;Godin & Gingras, 2000) or the era since 1990 (Bornmann, Wagner, & Leydesdorff, 2015). Moreover, comparative studies have considered the number Introduction of universities in each country, but have not focused on the different institutional models that shaped the development of the higher education sector, and ultimately, universities' capacity for scientific research (Meo, Al Masri, Usmani, Memon, & Zaidi, 2013;Meo, Usmani, Vohra, & Bukhari, 2013;Teodorescu, 2000). ...
In The Century of Science — edited by Justin J.W. Powell, David P. Baker, and Frank Fernandez — a multicultural, international team of authors examines the global rise of scholarly research in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and health (STEM+) fields. At the beginning of the 20th century, the global center-point of scientific productivity was about half way between Western Europe and the U.S., in the North Atlantic. Then, the center moved steadily westward and slightly southward—reflecting the burgeoning science capacity of the U.S. supported by America’s thriving public and private universities, technological innovation, and overall economic growth. After WWII, this began to change as the course of the world’s scientific center of gravity turned and for the next 70 years traveled eastward, the direction it still travels, especially due to the rise of China and other prolific East Asian countries, such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Europe continues to be the center of global science. Focusing on these developments, this volume provides historical and sociological understandings of the ways that higher education has become an institution that, more than ever before, shapes science and society. Case studies, supported by the most historically and spatially extensive database on STEM+ publications available, of selected countries in Europe, North America, East Asia, and the Middle East, emphasize recurring themes: the institutionalization and differentiation of higher education systems to the proliferation of university-based scientific research fostered by research policies that support continued university expansion leading to the knowledge society. Growing worldwide, research universities appear to be the most legitimate sites for knowledge production.
Countries like France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Japan began the 20th century with prerequisites in place to realize the emerging model of university-based research. Over the past several decades, China, South Korea, and Taiwan, with different historical legacies and conflicts in education and research policy, have witnessed explosive growth, sustained by public and private funds. Qatar recently embarked on an ambitious government-driven effort to develop a world-class university sector and cultivate academic STEM+ research from scratch. These more recent entrants to the global scientific enterprise pose the question whether it is possible to leapfrog across decades, or even centuries, of cultivating university systems, to compete globally. Simultaneously with international and regional competition, world-leading science increasingly implies collaboration across cultural and political borders as global scientific production and networking continue to rise exponentially.
This volume’s case studies offer new insights into how countries develop the university-based knowledge thought fundamental to meeting social needs and economic demands. Despite repeated warnings that universities would lose in relevance to other organizational forms in the production of knowledge, our findings demonstrate incontrovertibly that universities have become more—not less—important actors in the world of knowledge. The past hundred years have seen the global triumph of the research university.
... Until now, our understanding of the long-term development of global science production has been limited by available data. Empirical studies and bibliometric analyses have examined scientific publications as early as the 1970s (Schofer, 2004), but most have focused on the decades since 1980 (Adams, 2009;Adams, Black, Clemmons, & Stephan, 2005;Bornmann & Mutz, 2015;Godin & Gingras, 2000) or the era since 1990 (Bornmann, Wagner, & Leydesdorff, 2015). Moreover, comparative studies have considered the number Introduction of universities in each country, but have not focused on the different institutional models that shaped the development of the higher education sector, and ultimately, universities' capacity for scientific research (Meo, Al Masri, Usmani, Memon, & Zaidi, 2013;Meo, Usmani, Vohra, & Bukhari, 2013;Teodorescu, 2000). ...
Purpose - This chapter provides an overview of the findings and chapters of a thematic volume in the International Perspectives on Education and Society (IPES) series. It describes the common dataset and methods used by an international research team. Design/methodology/approach - The chapter synthesizes the results of a series of country-level case studies and cross-national and regional comparisons on the growth of scientific research from 1900 until 2011. Additionally, the chapter provides a quantitative analysis of global trends in scientific, peer-reviewed publishing over the same period. Findings - The introduction identifies common themes that emerged across the case studies examined in-depth during the multi-year research project Science Productivity, Higher Education, Research and Development and the Knowledge Society (SPHERE). First, universities have long been and are increasingly the primary organizations in science production around the globe. Second, the chapters describe in-country and cross-country patterns of competition and collaboration in scientific publications. Third, the chapters describe the national policy environments and institutionalized organizational forms that foster scientific research. Originality/value - The introduction reviews selected findings and limitations of previous bibliometric studies and explains that the chapters in the volume address these limitations by applying neo-institutional theoretical frameworks to analyze bibliometric data over an extensive period.
... 3 Adams and Griliches (1998) and Jacob and Lefgren (2011) find little evidence that research grant funding has positive effects on knowledge production. In contrast, Payne and Siow (2003), Adams (2009), and Gurmu, Black, and Stephan (2010) find positive effects of research grants on knowledge production in universities. ...
Every year billions of dollars are spent on research grants to produce new knowledge in universities. However, as grants may also affect other research funding, the effects of financial resources on knowledge production remain unclear. To uncover how financial resources affect knowledge production, we study the effects of research spending itself. Utilizing the legal constraints on university spending from an endowment we develop an instrumental variables approach. Our approach instruments for university research spending with time-series variation in stock prices interacted with cross-sectional variation in initial endowment market values for research universities in the United States. Our analysis reveals that research spending has a substantial positive effect on the number of papers produced, but not their impact. We also demonstrate that research spending effects are quite similar at private and public universities. (JEL H5, I2, O3)
... ent investment in public higher education is hardly limited to New England, and it has implications that extend well beyond the accessibility of education to kids from middle and lower-income households. While other countries have devoted increased resources to research at their universities, research activity has declined at American universities. Adams (2009) identifies a " slowdown in research output during the 1990s in the U.S., " and finds that it is " due largely to a deceleration in the growth rate of resources in U.S. public universities. " ...
Jeffrey Thompson presents evidence that investing in state infrastructure and building the skills of the current and future workforce are among the most effective ways to create jobs in New England. Prioritizing Approaches to Economic Development in New England provides ample evidence that infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, energy transmission systems, drinking water, and the like) and education are effective approaches for creating jobs and generating economic growth. By necessity, infrastructure repairs employ local workers and use local materials. These activities would also meet an increasingly urgent need: evidence reviewed by Thompson shows that 40% of bridges in the region are structurally deficient; 80% of the region’s dams present significant hazard; most of our roads are in poor or mediocre condition; and our drinking water infrastructure is in need of $12 billion worth of repairs and renovations. Thompson describes how, instead of making these investments, state policymakers are too often turning to corporate tax breaks to lure businesses to their state and public subsidies for employers who promise to hire workers in the state. These policies have been tried for decades, but Thompson presents the clear evidence that these tax subsidies don’t work to create jobs or revitalize state economies.
Higher education, particularly in the U.S., is in crisis. The crisis stems from a contradiction that requires educators and universities to prioritize two conflicting missives: care and efficiency. This work draws on social theory and empirical social science research, and the case-study experiences of a first-generation, nontraditional college student turned pandemic-era professor to interrogate the political, economic, and historical roots of the contradiction. At the micro-level lies the experience of teaching and learning through difficult times, produced ultimately as byproducts of modernity. At the macro-level, the neoliberal political-economic regime structures higher education's responses to said crises, serving to deepen rather than address the contradiction. At the meso-level, public schools have long faced contradictory missives and public pressures to accomplish what could not be accomplished elsewhere. Drawing on these elements, paths forward are sketched for higher education, supplementing theory with public opinion research on higher education.
In this paper, we estimate the returns to lobbying by universities. To motivate our empirical work, we develop a simple theoretical model of university lobbying for academic earmarks. Our statistical analysis shows that universities represented by a House Appropriations Committee (HAC) or Senate Appropriations Committee (SAC) member spend less money on lobbying than those that are not represented. In addition, using instrumental variables estimations, we show that universities without HAC or SAC representation may receive some benefit to lobbying for earmarks, although in many estimations this benefit is not statistically different from zero. However, for universities with HAC or SAC representation, a 10 percent increase in lobbying yields an additional 2.8 percent or 3.5 percent increase in earmarks, respectively. This suggests that there are large returns to lobbying for academic earmarks if a university is represented by a member of one the HAC or SAC, but little or no return if not.
When academic researchers participate in commercialization using for-profit firms there is a potentially costly trade-off – their time and effort are diverted away from academic knowledge creation. This is a form of brain drain on the not-for-profit research sector which may reduce knowledge accumulation and adversely impact long-run economic growth. In this paper, we examine the economic significance of the brain drain phenomenon using scientist-level panel data. We identify life scientists who start or join for-profit firms using information from the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program and analyze the research performance of these scientists relative to a control group of randomly selected research peers. Combining our statistical results with data on the number of university spin-offs in the U.S. from 1994 to 2004 we find the academic brain drain has a nontrivial impact on knowledge creation in the not-forprofit research sector.
Scientific research has come to dominate many American universities. Even with growing external support, increasingly the costs of scientific research are being funded out of internal university funds. Our paper explains why this is occuring, presents estimates of the magnitudes of start-up cost packages being provided to scientists and engineers and then uses panel data to estimate the impact of the growing cost of science on student/faculty ratios, faculty salaries and undergraduate tuition.We find that universities whose own expenditures on research are growing the most rapidly, ceteris paribus, have had the greatest increase in student faculty ratios and, in the private sector, higher tuition increases. Thus, undergraduate students bear part of the cost of increased institutional expenditures on research.
This article measures scientific influence by means of citations to academic papers. The data source is the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI); the scientific institutions included are the top 110 U.S. research universities; the 12 main fields that classify the data cover nearly all of science; and the time period is 1981-1999. Altogether the database includes 2.4 million papers and 18.8 million citations. Thus the evidence underlying our findings accounts for much of the basic research conducted in the United States during the last quarter of the 20th century. This research in turn contributes a significant part of knowledge production in the U.S. during the same period. The citation measure used is the citation probability, which equals actual citations divided by potential citations, and captures average utilization of cited literature by individual citing articles. The mean citation probability within fields is on the order of 10-5. Cross-field citation probabilities are one-tenth to one-hundredth as large, or 10-6 to 10-7. Citations between pairs of citing and cited fields are significant in less than one-fourth of the possible cases. It follows that citations are largely bounded by field, with corresponding implications for the limits of scientific influence. Cross-field citation probabilities appear to be symmetric for mutually citing fields. Scientific influence is asymmetric within fields, and occurs primarily from top institutions to those less highly ranked. Still, there is significant reverse influence on higher-ranked schools. We also find that top institutions are more often cited by peer institutions than lower-ranked institutions are cited by their peers. Overall the results suggest that knowledge spillovers in basic science research are important, but are circumscribed by field and by intrinsic relevance. Perhaps the most important implication of the results are the limits that they seem to impose on the returns to scale in the knowledge production function for basic research, namely the proportion of available knowledge that spills over from one scientist to another.
The relationship between age and the publishing productivity of Ph.D. scientists is analyzed using data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (National Research Council) and the Science Citation Index. The longitudinal nature of the data allows for the identification of pure aging effects. In five of the six areas studied, life-cycle aging effects are present. Only in particle physics, where scientists often speak of being on a "religious quest," is the indication that scientific productivity is not investment-motivated. Vintage effects are also considered. The expectation that the latest educated are the most productive is not generally supported by the data. Copyright 1991 by American Economic Association.
Market Structure and Foreign Trade presents a coherent theory of trade in the presence of market structures other than perfect competition. The theory it develops explains trade patterns, especially of industrial countries, and provides an integration between trade and the role of multinational enterprises. Relating current theoretical work to the main body of trade theory, Helpman and Krugman review and restate known results and also offer entirely new material on contestable markets, oligopolies, welfare, and multinational corporations, and new insights on external economies, intermediate inputs, and trade composition.
Technology’s contribution to economic growth and competitiveness has been the subject of vigorous debate in recent years. This book demonstrates the importance of a historical perspective in understanding the role of technological innovation in the economy. The authors examine key episodes and institutions in the development of the U.S. research system and in the development of the research systems of other industrial economies. They argue that the large potential contributions of economics to the understanding of technology and economic growth have been constrained by the narrow theoretical framework employed within neoclassical economies. A richer framework, they believe, will support a more fruitful dialogue among economists, policymakers, and managers on the organization of public and private institutions for innovation. David Mowery is Associate Professor of Business and Public Policy at the School of Business Administration, University of California, Berkeley. Nathan S. Rosenberg is Fairleigh Dickinson Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is the author of Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics (CUP, 1983).
Between 1992 and 1999, the number of papers published by U.S. academics fell by 9 percent as reported in the National Sciences Board’s Science & Engineering Indicators–2002 (SEI). This chapter seeks to understand why this occurred. A 9 percent decline in output could be a valuable tool for advocacy for almost any constituency in U.S. academia. Advocates could report trends in particular fields over limited periods of time to support arguments about the deleterious effects of the emerging patent culture, the insidious effects of health insurers on medical research, the harm of decreasing federal support for engineering, the dangers of an aging university professoriate, and so on. This chapter approaches the question differently. It argues that to understand this decline properly we must take a step back and look at trends across the U.S. research enterprise. When we do, we see that the decline is so broadly based that any explanation particular to one field of research or even to universities as a whole must be inadequate. This chapter looks for a global phenomenon that explains both the broad pattern of decline and its surprising obscurity.
The focus of this paper is the research performance of a system of universi- ties and sciences. Using data from the US during the 1980s we study the relationship between research output and R&D in 8 different fields of science We begin at the field level by examining the time series behavior of outputs measured by papers and citations in relation to R&D. At this level we find approximate parity between growth rates of papers and citations and the growth rate of R&D, except mathematics and agriculture, which diverge from parity in opposite directions, suggesting the predominance of a CRS production process for new scientific results. We then conduct an analysis at the university and field using small samples of leading U.S. research universities. We find returns to R&D are diminishing in nearly every case. One explanation points to the importance of research spillovers between universities and fields which are excluded at the university level but not at the system level, another is that errors in R&D are more important at the university level. The errors arise from misclassification of R&D by university and field. These explana- tions emphasize the relevance of research spillovers and of the system-wide aspects of university research, and pinpoint the sources of failings of current data on science resource. In addition we explore some efficiency aspects of the university system. Our findings suggest that leading schools have lower average and marginal costs of performing research than lesser institutions, and that leading institutions have a comparative advantage at generating higher quality, more highly cited research. In our comparisons of private and public institutions the results are not as one-sided, yet they suggest that private schools have a comparative advantage at generating more highly cited research.
This paper presents new evidence on research and teaching productivity in universities using a panel of 102 top U.S. schools during 1981-1999. Faculty employment grows at 0.6 percent per year, compared with growth of 4.9 percent in industrial researchers. Productivity growth per researcher is 1.4-6.7 percent and is higher in private universities. Productivity growth per teacher is 0.8-1.1 percent and is higher in public universities. Growth in research productivity within universities exceeds overall growth, because the research share grows in universities where productivity growth is less. This finding suggests that allocative efficiency of U.S. higher education declined during the late 20th century. R&D stock, endowment, and post-docs increase research productivity in universities, the effect of nonfederal R&D is less, and the returns to research are diminishing. Since the nonfederal R&D share grows and is higher in public schools, this may explain the rising inefficiency. Decreasing returns in research but not teaching suggest that most differences in university size are due to teaching.
This paper develops four propositions that show that changes in the global job market for science and engineering (S&E) workers are eroding US dominance in S&E, which diminishes comparative advantage in high tech production and creates problems for American industry and workers: (1) The U.S. share of the world's science and engineering graduates is declining rapidly as European and Asian universities, particularly from China, have increased S&E degrees while US degree production has stagnated. 2) The job market has worsened for young workers in S&E fields relative to many other high-level occupations, which discourages US students from going on in S&E, but which still has sufficient rewards to attract large immigrant flows, particularly from developing countries. 3) Populous low income countries such as China and India can compete with the US in high tech by having many S&E specialists although those workers are a small proportion of their work forces. This threatens to undo the "North-South" pattern of trade in which advanced countries dominate high tech while developing countries specialize in less skilled manufacturing. 4) Diminished comparative advantage in high-tech will create a long period of adjustment for US workers, of which the off-shoring of IT jobs to India, growth of high-tech production in China, and multinational R&D facilities in developing countries, are harbingers. To ease the adjustment to a less dominant position in science and engineering, the US will have to develop new labor market and R&D policies that build on existing strengths and develop new ways of benefitting from scientific and technological advances in other countries.
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