Research Universities and Their Future in the United States. (June 22, 2013)

On September 7, 2012 Science published the first of six projected articles on "creating and maintaining global research universities". The final one "How Long Can the U.S. Stay on Top?" by Jeffrey Mervis is featured in the June 21, 2013 issue (Vol. 340 no. 6139 pp. 1394-1399).

Below the views of a few of their senior administrators..

Shirley Tilghman, President Princeton University: "The center of intellectual excellence has moved very often over the centuries.  It started with Bologna and the great Italian universities. It moved to Germany, then to England, and only relatively recently across the Atlantic to the United States. That suggests that the center of gravity could easily move outside the United States if we stop paying attention to the ingredients that make our great universities the magnets they are today."

Drew Faust, President of Harvard University: gainsays that the great schools rise and fall on the basis of some immutable historical clock. "There's something fatalistic and deterministic in saying that this is cyclical and we should just sit back and say that our cycle is done. The United States is still the strongest economy in the world and has the strongest university system. Whether one or both of those things persists depends on us, not on some predetermined fate."

Mr Mervis notes that: "Vannevar Bush in Science: The Endless Frontier, his influential 1945 report, requested by President Franklin Roosevelt, emphasized the importance of federal support for academic research. The report led to the creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and fueled the rapid expansion of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

"[A] top-ranked research university must ingest ever-increasing amounts of money to pay for the new buildings, updated equipment and facilities, promising students, and world-class researchers required to stay on top... the budgets of elite U.S. universities roughly doubled. And that increase has generally been poured into research rather than into creating a larger pool of undergraduates. While the overall budget of Stanford University, for example, has grown from $1.8 billion in 2000 to $4.4 billion this year, the size of its freshman class has remained at about 1750.

"At elite research universities, the two biggest revenue streams are typically sponsored research (overwhelmingly from the federal government) and investment income (meaning philanthropy and the income generated from a school's endowment).. research dollars are more prestigious because they are awarded through competitive peer review by funding agencies such as NSF and NIH. Those dollars are so important that federal funding has become a de facto measure of overall quality for a university.

"Last year, for example, philanthropic academic giving totaled $31 billion, according to the Council for Aid to Education (CAE), a New York–based nonprofit that tracks private giving to education.... For 29 of the past 30 years, either Harvard or Stanford has been ranked No. 1 on the list of top fundraising universities, according to CAE. And it's probably no coincidence that they also rank first and second, respectively, in the Shanghai rankings.

Drew Faust: "Philanthropy is hugely important to us; our endowment generates about 35% of our operating budget. And it's the result of centuries of philanthropy."

Mr Mervis: "At Stanford, investment income (donations and the interest from its endowment) this year generated $1.1 billion, one-quarter of the school's $4.4 billion operating budget.

"Private angels have helped the University of California, Berkeley, offset reduced state government support. State funding as a percentage of the university's overall budget has dropped from 30% to 11% since 2004."

Robert Birgeneau,  Chancellor University of California, Berkeley: "If philanthropy disappeared, that would have a huge negative impact on us."

Princeton historian Anthony Grafton: "The top schools, especially the privates, have this very precarious structure which basically rests on the assumption that we subsidize everybody now, and then we get the money back 40 years later when they're rich. And nobody knows if that's right."

Drew Faust: "There are very important new areas of exploration into which we need to move, and if that occurs without growth, then there are important things we're doing that we'd need to stop doing. We would need to make tradeoffs to free up resources for areas where there are expanding opportunities. And those tradeoffs will be very costly in terms of our research and education missions."

Shirley Tilghman: "It's very hard to go onto any research university campus, particularly one with an academic medical center, and not see a new building going up, So what is the expectation for how research in that building is going to be funded?

"If you ask any medical school dean, they will say that it will be paid from a combination of direct and indirect costs funded by the federal government. Given the constrained prospects for increases in federal funding for the next, who knows, 5 to 10 years, that dean has to believe that, in order to pay for the building, his or her institution is going to out-compete, to an even greater extent than they do now, every other academic institution.

"But this just can't be true for every academic medical center. It does not compute. I think we need to have a conversation between the government and the research universities on how to live at steady state. I don't see that conversation happening right now... "The greatest risk to American universities is complacency and self-satisfaction." Nevertheless, she opines: ""I'm really heartened by the type of intellectual partnerships that are happening all over the world that allow us to fund really expensive science."

Mr Mervis the refers to the eruptions of the Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) and notes that none of the administrators he interviewed believed that they will undermine the quality of education on their campus, a development that has been suggested could make it harder to attract talented students, especially from other countries.

Mark Nordenberg, President University of Pittsburgh: "If you talk to those students, a big part of what they want to do is to be in America and learn from interacting with Americans. And you can't do that effectively without being here. And when students look back at their experiences and say how much they learned, it's often because of the interactions outside of the classroom, with a faculty member or other students, or through some extracurricular activity."