Tuesday, June 30, 2020


Why Do American Universities Lead the World in Scientific Research?

Miguel Urquiola is professor and chair of the department of economics at Columbia University. His special field is education and his book Markets, Minds, and Money: Why America Leads the World in University Research is about American higher education—its history, its relationship to higher education in Europe, and the trajectory it has followed from the first green shoots of the Ivy League.

Urquiola describes how the history of American universities put them on a path different from European universities, a path where economic forces could act in ways that allowed American institutions to diverge and, in the late 20th century, to become pre-eminent engines of scientific research.

This pre-eminence occurred despite statistics putting US scientific literacy well behind many European countries. For example, the second graph in the book shows PISA math scores for students from Germany, France, the UK, and the US: The US lags well behind in every year from 2003 to 2012. The first graph shows years of schooling: here the US leads. Despite more years of school, Americans do worse than the British, French, and Germans.

Nevertheless, something is working. The next graph in the book shows “the frequency with which Nobel winners’ biographies mention universities in different countries:” the US lagged massively in 1870, draws even in about 1920, and pulls way ahead thereafter. The US also leads in the number of science Nobels, but Urquiola’s point is that the work that contributes to the prize always occurs much earlier. The US leads in both.

How did the US achieve leadership in research despite several counter-indications and a slow start? Urquiola’s answer is that our higher education evolved in the direction of the free market. In European countries, institutions of higher education evolved in the opposite direction.

By the 20th century, US higher education conformed to three principles, what Urquiola terms

self-rule: the institution can go its own way,

free entry: new institutions face no barriers to entry, and
free scope: an institution can choose just what services it offers.

To make his point, Urquiola traces the history of higher ed in the US from its beginning with Harvard in 1636, William and Mary, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, Princeton, and others. The land-grant colleges followed after the Civil War, and the growth of US academe accelerated to reach its contemporary peak of nearly 5,000 institutions.

Barriers to entry were modest and most of those institutions were essentially autonomous. The varied offerings of the schools conformed to what Urquiola calls free scope.

By contrast, universities in Germany, which was until the early 20th century a world leader in academic research, were all supported by the various states and were far from autonomous.

After Germany came Britain, where Oxford and Cambridge retained some autonomy. But by 1910, US research output had overtaken Britain and France; Germany, of course, fell behind after World War II and has yet to fully recover.

In Urquiola’s view, the process that propelled the US to the front works like this:

As [economist Gary] Becker…pointed out …when people purchase schooling, they do not buy a consumer good like a phone—they make an investment to prepare for subsequent markets. For example, individuals go to school to prepare for a career, or to render themselves more attractive to potential partners. In other words, they see education creating an asset that Becker called human capital.

American colleges and universities compete in a more-or-less free market, says Urquiola. The bases for competition, however, are not what you might think. It isn’t the quality of teaching. Teaching effectiveness is highly variable.  Excellent researchers may be terrible teachers and there is no reliable way to evaluate teaching. So, institutions compete mostly on other grounds.

Most important is what Urquiola calls sorting. In the early days, the sorting was religious: Baptists wanted to go to a school with Baptists, Presbyterians with Presbyterians, and so on. This tendency led to massive growth in the number of colleges but, Urquiola argues, inhibited interest in research, which was costly and essentially irrelevant, having no bearing on students’ choice of school.

But as schools became more autonomous, sorting operated differently. After the Civil War, Cornell and Johns Hopkins broke ground by specializing in research and advanced instruction instead of denominational sorting. Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, MIT, Stanford, and others followed, realizing that they could best compete by hiring specialists who could both teach and do research.

As a description of what happened, that is accurate. But exactly why did the denomination of a school become less important and its research excellence more?

Perhaps it was the industrialization of society, with an increasing need for a diverse range of skills, that provided the market to which Harvard and the others responded by beefing up their research capability. Whatever the reasons, the attractiveness of a school came to increasingly depend on the new services it offered and the kind of students it could attract. The student population itself then became an attraction: like-seeking-like or -wannabe-like.

“Best” necessarily has different meanings in different schools. Now, Caltech just looks for the best techies; Harvard looks for the brightest, yes, but not just the brightest but also children of faculty and alumni, ensuring the loyalty of the former and the donations of the latter. Approved minorities must also be favored. Harvard (like many other elite schools) must therefore sometimes discriminate against the brightest—Jews and Asians, for example (clashing with its professed search for excellence tout court and leading to a lawsuit)—in favor of what it judges to be the “best” for its market niche.

Colleges began to behave like businesses. To succeed, they had to offer a varied set of services, which demanded specialized practitioners: faculty who also did research. The most successful at this process could then supply a different kind of sorting. The better schools picked the smartest, most successful faculty. The most brilliant faculty in a given area will render a university more attractive to others with similar interests.

Then, by being recognized as the “best” schools, they could sort—attract—the best students. In short, selection/sorting for excellence involves positive feedback. The result is a steep gradient, with a few institutions at the top and a long tail of those below.

Research is an elite activity. A handful of universities dwarf the rest in terms of research output. Poor scientific literacy in the mass of the population is irrelevant so long as the brightest fraction of students are well-educated and offered research opportunities.

The disparity between the best and the rest is a source of continuing tension in US higher education. It means that admissions officers are constantly trying to re-adjust a recipe whose ingredients are academic (SAT, grades), athleticism, legacy, “diversity,” and the probability that the applicant or their parents will be of some help to the school. Their oft-expressed aim is to promote social mobility while at the same time ensuring the financial future of the institution. The debate persists because the two objectives are partly incompatible.

The “positional stability” of elite institutions may allow them to “cheat,” as Urquiola suggests, to slight teaching in favor of research excellence. It also allows them to support luxurious facilities for undergraduates and a plethora of academically questionable but politically trendy academic programs.

Urquiola’s book makes sense of a complex issue: How the current state of academe in the US evolved from its humble beginnings and how that evolution led to a level of research excellence eventually exceeding that of European universities. His explanation that American colleges and universities competed in a more-or-less free market fashion rings true.

European universities certainly do many things right. For example, the faculty exert more control over the structure of the institution than in the US and play a role in student admissions, unlike in American schools. They probably select students who are better qualified academically than in the US, where other considerations—donor probability, athletic ability, “diversity,” etc.—loom larger. But control by faculty also makes the institution less flexible. Control by an independent administration makes it easier to create new programs and departments. Score one for the US (except for all those dodgy “studies” departments that are less prevalent in Europe).

I must disagree with Urquiola’s assumption that grant-supported research is a net cost. In my experience, administrators routinely urge faculty to get research grants, with their hefty “indirect cost” supplements, while simultaneously complaining about the cost of research. The occasional researcher who can manage without an external grant tends to be criticized rather than lauded. External research funds enable an institution to expand; they may also make a profit.

Also, Urquiola remarks briefly on the escalating fees for elite schools, attributing their rise to “changes in their product” and the Baumol effect, apparently forgetting demand and supply. Demand has increased partly because of federal loan largesse. The supply of elite schools is fixed and always will be. They are what economists call a positional good: No matter how many schools there are, the handful at the top will always have a special attraction. Given a fixed supply and growing demand, “we don’t want to leave money on the table!” as an administrative colleague of mine once remarked. No need to invoke Baumol.

What does Urquiola’s analysis predict? The future of academic research is probably safe—assuming that those elite universities survive the COVID crisis relatively unscathed. Their positional status (and the high fees that it permits), together with large research budgets, still allows them to “cheat” by downplaying teaching and by encouraging academic programs that seem more interested in political activism than scholarship.

Urquiola deserves credit for highlighting American academic research pre-eminence and giving a plausible description of the historical process that made it possible. Our higher education system is messy, but due to competition, it works rather well.

SOURCE 







Don’t Give Civics the Common Core Treatment

You shouldn’t build a “national church” if you’re a “minority religion,” University of Arkansas professor Jay Greene has cautioned for years. 

By that, Greene means that those working to reform existing systems shouldn’t look to the national level for policy implementation, as they risk creating an architecture that could be co-opted for different ends in the future.

Yet, education scholar Chester “Checker” Finn says that’s exactly what conservatives should do as he argues in favor of a national civics curriculum.

Finn says that it is “time for conservatives to suppress their allergic reaction to a ‘national curriculum’ long enough to encourage developing and deploying a national ‘citizenship’ course.”

Although, importantly, Finn says that this effort would “optimally” be undertaken by private philanthropy and that he is “nowhere close to suggesting that the federal government should impose such a course on anyone,” but he’s fine with federal funding incentives to states in return for adoption of a national civics curriculum.

That’s where a well-intentioned idea gets complicated.

As Greene has long warned, special-interest groups and teachers unions are far more politically powerful than those working to reform the system. So, those “minority religions” in favor of building a “national church” should recognize that “inevitably it won’t be their gospel being preached.”

Whose civics gospel will it be?

Perhaps that of The New York Times’ Nikole Hannah-Jones. After all, her “1619 Project,” which claims that “[o]ur democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written,” was recently awarded the Pulitzer Prize. The 1619 Project already has been adopted in an estimated 4,500 classrooms across the country.

Some of us are still battle-worn from the Common Core wars. As brutal as that fight was (and remains), the Common Core pushback was against national standards and tests for math and reading—seemingly innocuous when compared with what a debate over civics content would likely bring.

In the 1990s, the Clinton administration pushed for national history standards. Conservatives viewed them as highly politicized; others saw them as too lengthy and unwieldy for teachers. Ultimately, 99 members of the U.S. Senate voted to condemn the standards.

That’s a fight that would be relitigated under any national effort to define civics curriculum.

Finn’s desire for a stronger civics curriculum is understandable. Too often what we see today is civic activism without civic knowledge, to paraphrase David Bobb, president of the Bill of Rights Institute.

One need look no further than the Annenberg civics survey finding that just one-third of Americans can name a single branch of government. Or the National Assessment of Educational Progress’ civics outcomes. Just 23% of American eighth-graders are proficient in civics, according to the most recent administration of the test.

Clearly, we cannot abandon the debate about the content that is taught to the 45 million children in public schools across the country today. That’s a point Robert Pondiscio of the Fordham Institute makes forcefully when he says doing so “risks abandoning the next generation to semi-literacy and, therefore, less than full citizenship.”

Nor should that ground be ceded to the political left, which, former Education Secretary William Bennett has argued, “knows very well what it intends to do.”

But right now, the market is going gangbusters providing strong civics content in response to overall interest in how civics in taught. Crowning a single national curriculum as the model U.S. civics curriculum would threaten to blunt that welcome momentum.

Whether it’s the Jack Miller Center, the Bill of Rights Institute, the James Madison Institute, or the Ashbrook Center, scores of organizations are rising to the occasion to provide solid civics curriculums grounded in the founding principles.

What we need now is for public school principals to work with their school boards and have a curriculum- and textbook-adoption process in place to secure these excellent resources in schools across the country.

Parents should demand they do so.

At the same time, we should continue to expand private school choice and enable children to attend private schools that are the right fit for them.

The most rigorous research finds that private school choice increases political participation, tolerance, and voluntarism, and enhances overall civic values.

The district school monopoly has been failing in this regard for decades. National civics standards won’t correct a fundamental misalignment in power and incentives that exist due to an absence of school choice for most families. Indeed, such standards would complicate matters.

Choice, coupled with parents’ involved in the content taught in their children’s public schools, provides a better path forward.

SOURCE 






Australia: Time for universities to ditch the uniform and change courses

I am afraid that I endorse the idea dismissed below:  That a university without a committment to research is just a technical college

A few years back, at a Melbourne book launch, Gareth Evans publicly confessed that he and the rest of the Hawke government had more or less allowed a 40-year-old firebrand to run amok with the nation’s higher education system 30 years ago.

The former foreign affairs minister, who later went on to be chancellor of the Australian National University, didn’t use those precise words, of course.

Instead, Evans said back then that “none of John Dawkins’s fellow cabinet ministers at the time, and that includes me — or for that matter anyone else outside the circle of university and college administrators most immediately and obviously affected — really took much notice of what he was up to from 1987-91, or had any real sense of the scale and significance of the changes he was forcing, as he mounted his blitzkrieg in the higher education system”.

This week, as the Coalition lobbed grenades into the system the former employment, education and training minister set in place three decades ago, Dawkins declined to comment on the past, present or future of Australian universities. But it’s a safe bet he would agree with the description of how he flew solo in a high-risk operation to shrink the institutions, expand the number of students and bring back the fees Labor giant Gough Whitlam had abolished on January 1, 1974.

They were radical reforms, quickly dubbed a revolution, yet the single system turned out to be essentially conservative. Australia held fast to the traditional idea of the university: an institution committed to high-level research, teaching and community engagement.

The unified national system is widely considered to have led to uniformity, not innovation or diversity, and across three decades, despite huge increases in fees, dependence on international students and successive attempts by governments to direct the sector, that notion has endured.

Former University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis has noted: “Decisions of a powerful minister more than a generation ago reinforced the singular Australian idea of a university.” In his 2017 book, The Australian Idea of a University (which Evans launched on that November day), Davis noted that our universities are not identical but they are all examples of a “specific style of university”.

Not everyone agrees. Some see evolving diversity in our system, but as former University of Canberra vice-chancellor Stephen Parker says: “There is no doubt if you look overseas we have a rather singular model compared to the diversity that exists in Holland, Germany and other countries.”

Parker, who now heads the national education sector practice at KPMG, doesn’t blame Dawkins but says Australia continues to “mime” the idea that a university must include research, with institutions “drifting” to that model rather than some adopting a teaching-first approach.

Dawkins himself has said through the years — during which there have been around a dozen other education ministers — that the profile process he set up allowed the institutions to choose their own direction. He has said it was never his intention that small colleges of advanced education would opt to copy the big universities rather than work on becoming teaching-only institutions. It’s understood that in his view, the lack of diversity that emerged was not mandated and was an unfortunate outcome of the decisions by autonomous universities.

Be that as it may, the system remains ready for reshaping for a modern era.

Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan has not been explicit about his intentions but Parker says the new fee structure, based on teaching costs without recognition of research costs, is a de facto separation of the two elements. Tehan will make a statement soon about research and Parker believes it could finally change our view of what a “real” university should look like.

The Coalition is moving at a time of some disquiet about our universities. Some critics claim a corruption of standards in a system where 25 per cent of the money comes from overseas students. Some claim a corruption of free speech. Some argue for less thinking and more training. Arguments about the role of the university intersect with arguments about society’s willingness to spend the money, private or public, on higher education.

In that sense at least not much has changed since Dawkins.

The debate about the nature of the university had been running for years as the highly regarded institutes of technology — part of the second tier — showed they were bigger, better and bolder than some of the newer, smaller universities. Were they universities in all but name? What made the universities so special?

The 19 universities had a simple answer. They were dedicated to research and their teaching depended on academic research. Colleges and institutes were dedicated to teaching. They might do some research on the side but they could not be considered in the same breath as universities.

Sometimes the debate seemed to play out on the proverbial pin head and was confined largely to those inside the sector. There was little political interest in Canberra about whether Deakin University had more right to the title, for example, than the Queensland Institute of Technology.

But the colleges’ lobby for recognition and access to federal research money converged fortuitously with Labor’s need to justify spending more public money on more places by introducing a system of private contributions via the HECS scheme.

Labor would backtrack on fees but at the same time it would demolish an outdated distinction between colleges and universities to create a level playing field. The 73 institutions would reduce to half that number and would be free to carve out their own profiles, unimpeded by nomenclature.

Some might emphasise teaching or industry engagement. Some might elevate research while still teaching an expanding student population. It was an opportunity to change the mix. Dawkins delivered status and access to research funding to the colleges. They backed him on student fees. The vice-chancellors wanted fees too but they were not so keen on the CAEs getting a name change and sharing research funds. In the end, they signed up to Dawkins. They had little choice even if they feared the colleges would dilute the university brand they had nurtured since the establishment of the University of Sydney in 1850.

As David Penington, who led Melbourne University at the time, said this week: “It was true that the universities did look down on the others in those days, and that was the problem that Dawkins sought to correct by his radical changes.”

In the end, tradition beat innovation as the new universities worked to build the research they figured would let them into the club.

Melbourne University’s Vin Massaro, who worked as the policy director for the peak university body at the time, the Australian Vice-Chancellors Committee, has some regrets about the way it panned out. “We created one sector but we didn’t make it clear to the institutions that they had the right to be more diverse,” he says. “Clearly, we could not afford 39 high-level research institutions, yet we were suddenly asking people in the former CAEs to teach and research in a way they had not been employed to do.”

Despite the rush for status based on research and uniformity, there have been changes in the past 30 years, particularly, as Davis has noted, in the offerings for the international student market. As well as the Group of Eight, the big capital-city campuses that include Sydney, Melbourne and the ANU have continued to draw away from the rest with their aspirations for high-level research.

But the diversity is limited, according to Massaro. “We keep stopping the institutions from being truly diverse,” he says. “We still suggest that if they don’t do research they are inferior. We have not yet educated the Australian public to accept that universities can do different things; rather, we have built a theoretical definition into the system that doesn’t fit with the current reality. We need a new definition of a university that allows each to determine the mix of teaching and research that is appropriate for its mission.

“However, they must all be excellent teaching institutions with graduate outcomes that can be measured. The extent … they choose to do research should be based on their capacity to attract competitive research funding.”

Massaro cites the California binar­y model of universities; one teaching-intensive, offering courses to master level, the other research-intensive offering courses to PhD level with high-level research. And he argues the Coalition’s fee changes are being introduced without a coherent and comprehensive vision or plan for the sector.

Penington agrees on the need for change, saying: “I don’t think all the universities are going to be viable just doing things the way that they have been. You can’t undo what has happened in the past. The mistake was (colleges) seeking to become uniform with the classical research universities.

“What we ought to have is universities that identify themselves especially by their strengths. The title university no longer has a meaning in itself. It doesn’t bring quality, it has to be earned.”

He believes the Dawkins model has cost the country in skills: “Some of the colleges were doing applied education and some were close to industry. That was a fundamental flaw of the whole Dawkins model because we didn’t have that ongoing population of people with applied knowledge. It was a weakness of the outcome that is seldom mentioned now.”

Parker says his discussions through the years with Dawkins convince him the then minister wanted a uniform funding system, not uniformity.

Parker says: “It wasn’t necessary that CAEs became universities, but what actually happened is that the universities cherrypicked to their advantage and the CAEs thought by and large it was to their advantage to get the prestige of the university name.

“So the unified national system became uniform and it has in a way been reinforced since 1990 with protocols of what counts as a university — that there has to be a research mission.

“I think the government is now saying, we are only funding teaching through the normal commonwealth funding and there will be an announcement on research soon. This is a big deal: the separating out of the funding of research and teaching is what could lay the groundwork for some unis to be really high-quality teaching organisations and a smaller number being research-focused. That would drive real diversity.”

The Tehan “revolution” is just beginning and time will show if it brings the diversity so many regard as essential. But the need for change is clear. As Davis said in his 2017 book: “The Australian idea of a university has served us well. It may also have run its course.”

SOURCE  


No comments: