(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 4:38 pm and is filed under higher education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Jay P. Greene's Blog 
It’s an interesting piece, and there is something there for the smaller universities . But it’s odd that he only mentions money brought in by research grants once and in passing — he’s right that newspapers are in the ad business, not the news business, but it’s also true that many universities are more and more in the research business, not the teaching business. This point is in there, but probably deserves more attention — for instance, can the smaller universities make thier situations better just by getting further into the research game? Probably.
Marcus-
What I took from his article is that the research business is being heavily subsidized by 300 kids in an auditorium with a TA running the class.
Oh, no, that’s not the case. Universities wouldn’t do research if it weren’t profitable.
I suspect the truth is that both the research and the teaching heavily subsidize a lot of administrative bloat and featherbedding.
Greg-
Thomas Sowell wrote a piece back in the early 1990s that made the case that universities are supremely self-indulgent because they can always pass off their costs to others. One way they do that is through research grants, but there are plenty of other ways- such as raising tuition and getting more federal and state money.
Some university research may be “profitable” but I suspect that very little of it actually even covers the costs. No one is out on the newsstands buying copies of the American Political Science Review, after all.
On the other hand, I think you are right about the administrative bloat and feather bedding, but disentangling that from research would be a difficult task.
if teaching were profitable and not research then tenure procedures etc. would be more heavily weighted for teaching — as is, research trumps teaching by a lot.
Teaching is indeed the red-headed step child of academia, but universities can currently get away with putting a TA in front of 300 students, creating a huge profit center. In other words- they can put anyone in front of a classroom.
Not everyone can attract research dollars, which is why academic prestige is attached to it.
Carey argues that the gravy train on 300 students and a TA is going to come to an end.
If research were a net drain on university resources, it would be discouraged. Instead, it’s extremely encouraged.
I would warn against suggesting that “if it were not profitable universities wouldn’t do it” line of reasoning.
Universities, including private ones, are not really subject to market forces like most businesses. They are heavily subsidized in one way or another, from student fees, to government grants, to government subsidized student loans.
Personally, I think while some research is a cash cow, most of it is about prestige, with tuition increases being used to subsidize research professors (and Olympic size swimming pools).
Just because they’re not subject to market discipline doesn’t mean they don’t seek out their own financial interests. K-12 schools aren’t subject to market discipline, yet virtually everything we write about on this blog is on how they seek their own financial interests.
And do you think there are no grants out there for research on lesbian food culture in fiction literature? Let me introduce you to a tiny little organization called the Ford Foundation. For starters.
Also, does the research really pay for itself? Universities often forget that the lab is a sunk cost, but it is a cost nonetheless. So while UNLV spends $1,900 on a whiteboard for an administrator, $900 on a chair for a president, and $350 on dinner for a VP using grant reimbursements, you have to wonder if all of that adds up in the end to pay for those labs, and $780 a square foot buildings: http://npri.org/blog/higher-priced-education.
If the subsidy did not exist and universities only earned an income off student tuition and private research grants, how much university research would still exist?
I’m not sure about that, but one thing I do know is that the University of Oklahoma wouldn’t be spending $50,000-$70,000 a year on a professor whose primary research focus is “lesbian food culture in fiction literature.”
…you just can’t make this crap up.
“They…seek their own financial interes” to be sure. So do (did) newspapers. The point is, can they continue to operate as before? Taxpayers would gain from an end to policies which subsidize bogus research and usless credentials. Faculty, whether teaching in job-guaranteed required courses or conducting subsidized research into “The Myth of the Individual in the Films of Clint Eastwood” (really), are articulate, well-paid, and have a lot of free time. They also have a more direct interest in maintaining the statud quo than any random taxpayer has in opposing it. They win the political battle with taxpayers in State legislatures. Whether they will win the battle with advancing technology is another question.
Some economist once suggested that awarding prizes for vital research would be a more efficient way to solve the “public goods” problem than to have researchers (e.g., university faculty) on retainer. This was how the British motivated the solution of finding longitude (Read Dava Sobel’s Longitude).