This spring, Syracuse University an nounced that it will withdraw from the prestigious American Association of Universities after 45 years of membership. At the heart of the problem is what qualifies as “prestigious” in higher education today.
Syracuse was really heading off a public embarrassment — the AAU would probably have it forced out — because its federal research funding has dropped. The University of Nebraska suffered just that fate a few months ago.
In other words, when parents and taxpayers are wondering how to reduce the costs of higher education, the colleges themselves believe that getting more money from the public till is the key to greater prestige.
Private cash doesn’t do it: The AAU actually discounts any dollars a university gets from private industry, because those funds generally aren’t awarded through what the organization considers an acceptable peer-review process.
In other words, schools get punished for not spending more tax dollars.
Syracuse gets private funds for projects like one that helps improve graduation rates in the urban schools nearby. There is nothing to suggest that this project is any less legitimate than similar, government-funded research. But the lords of academia assume that public dollars are somehow pure and untainted by biased parties, whereas private entities always have some selfish motivation.
Funny: Why not assume that public funding would skew the results of a study of a public-school system? Would government bureaucrats want to give money to folks who’ll criticize government-run schools?
Consider, too, what Syracuse would have to do to get more federal grants and keep its place in the AAU club: Spend more of its own money.
That’s just what another AAU school — SUNY-Stony Brook — has done. From 1999 to 2009, it more than doubled its own spending on research from $49.5 million to $113.8 million (in inflation-adjusted dollars), reports the Chronicle of Higher Education. Even so, it still dropped in the rankings of federal research money from 53 to 97.
A Chronicle study found that about a quarter of the 100 universities that received the most federal dollars in 1999 spent more of their own money over the next 10 years to fund research — but “have failed to see a payoff.”
The universities complain that federal research grants don’t do enough to fund overhead costs. If so, then universities need to learn how to say no. Because when schools dig into their own pockets, they’re really digging into ours. Research by Ron Ehrenberg at Cornell has shown that universities that spend more on research also see faster increases in tuition.
But it is not only the money that should concern us. Higher education is ruled almost entirely by reputation — and reputations, unfortunately, are made only on research. A 2005 study in the Journal of Higher Education found that for every extra hour a professor spends teaching, he or she will get paid less.
Meanwhile, we reward senior professors by subsidizing their research and letting them spend less time with students.
Cornell’s Ehrenberg also found that universities that spend more on research tend to increase student-faculty ratios and hire more adjunct faculty to do the actual teaching. And adjunct teaching has been repeatedly tied to lower graduation rates and higher rates of grade inflation.
It’s time for universities to return to their mission as educational institutions, not just research factories. Today’s college campuses host some legitimate scientific research — but also vast amounts of trivial research in the social sciences and the humanities. And that research is being done at the cost of educating undergraduates.
Any universities that want to continue down the research road should find some other sources to pay for it. This industry needs to start serving its customers.
Naomi Schaefer Riley is the author of “The Faculty Lounges . . . And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get the College Education You Paid For.”