When researchers compared the Shanghai Ranking of World Universities to budgetary constraints they found a number of important, but not surprising results.
The Shanghai Ranking includes things like the number of patents and Nobel Prize winners a university generates along with citations to faculty publications.
Among European universities, those that did not require government approval of the university budget had a 50% better ranking that those that did require government approval. European universities that were free to pay faculty as they saw fit also had a ranking 50% better than those required to pay faculty on a union style pay scale based on seniority. Ranking were also much higher when universities were free to select undergraduate student compared to those with government mandates. Rankings also increased with the percentage of research money that was competitively acquired. They found that their results also applied to the United States.
Sounds like the more private and autonomous a university is, the better it performs. The measuring rod (i.e. the Shanghai Index) may be bent, but the evidence clearly indicates government failure in universities.
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This is always the case in every sector of the economy that is either coercive unionization or voluntary market performance. Either way, thank you for the link.
My experience with colleges and universities in this country actually doesn’t bear that out – granted, I do not constitute a statistical sample…
The best educational experience I ever had (in a degree granting institution) was at the county-run Hillsborough Community College in Tampa. The worst was at the private University of Tampa (but, again, I only took a few courses there, and it may have been the nature of that department).
I don’t think it is about private vs public – I think it is about institutional mission. The HCC faculty saw teaching as their vocation, where the UT faculty looked at it as annoying.
This was even more true at U. Central Florida vs. U. South Florida – the professors at UCF were concerned with teaching students, and the USF professors were only concerned with research grants. (The econ department at USF was an exception to this – outside health econ people, the econ professors at USF cared about teaching).
Come to think of it, it is probably the grant process that corrupts the institutions, giving nominally private universities their “public attitude”, and pushing professors that give a blank towards the other institutions.
Education and Ethics
Saturday, June 20, 2009
How Can Education Be Improved?
This comparison is similar to comparing the value of the information available on the internet if it is not controlled by the government versus the value of the information available on the internet if it is controlled by the government.
Since the essence of the market process is its function as a source of true knowledge any and all intervention decreases the potential of prosperity.
Regards education, the potential prosperity that comes from a ‘higher’ education is retarded by any and all government involvement.
There is a sub-cultural at universities, period. That culture is vastly different from the culture at large and particularly the one in private industry.
Faculty members are important within the four corners of universities. Beyond the walls, they are “citizen John Doe” and “citizen Jane Doe”. Intelligentsia professes superiority over non-academics and appears to be dense outside university communities.
What I have observed is that research university faculty job options are limited. Some don’t want to teach, but have to which may or may not lead to poor teaching. Frequently, students are self-taught with marginal guidance.
Today, vase knowledge is garnered from excellent websites, reputable blogs (Mises) and well written and researched books. No Ivy league universities can match these portals.
“Sounds like the more private and autonomous a university is, the better it performs. The measuring rod (i.e. the Shanghai Index) may be bent, but the evidence clearly indicates government failure in universities.”
No, it doesn’t. Correlation does not imply causation, and in this case there is definitely something else going on. For instance, Oxford and Cambridge – the older English universities – have more autonomy and private resources for historical reasons, and they also had a head start in becoming centres of excellence, which is self perpetuating from attracting more and better people, projects and resources. On the other hand, most of the newer universities were deliberately set up as second tier, non-university institutions and only moved up to that status later. Even though individual histories varied, many remained second rank.
How do you account, then, for Berkeley, Ann Arbor, and Madison, three of the top ten research universities in the United States by virtually any measure? This is not to say that I wouldn’t favor privatizing all of them — I would — but one must have a strong argument for why they have been able to thrive.
@ Scott Grizzard: Note the title… *research* universities, not *education* universities.
@ P.M.Lawrence: So while correlation doesn’t imply causation it does imply some kind of historical law or accident of private resources and autonomy? Or maybe ARE private resources and autonomy pretty good explanations of these universities’ excellence?
It’s pretty easy to show in theory why private resources and autonomy work better than the contrary. The survey just shows how much of the privately funded and autonomous universities are good illustrations of the theory. That has nothing to do with “correlations do not imply causations”, and is pretty much a strawman.
No, Arend, “So while correlation doesn’t imply causation it does imply some kind of historical law or accident of private resources and autonomy?” is itself a straw man. It doesn’t necessarily imply anything; to find out what if anything is going on needs further enquiry. Even if “maybe ARE private resources and autonomy pretty good explanations of these universities’ excellence?” were true, it would need more to show it since other explanations also work. In the case of Oxford and Cambridge, they have retained much of their autonomy because they didn’t need to seek so much state help, in turn because – for whatever reason – they were succeeding. Clearly a lot more is going on and the reasoning presented in the article was insufficient to establish the cause and effect it suggested – and the article definitely did suggest that, not just seek to illustrate it, e.g. with “…the more private and autonomous a university is, the better it performs”. In at least some cases, things are the other way around to at least some extent.
Pm Lawrence, maybe you would have a point, if there wasn’t any theoretical case for private universities performing better than public universities; if the sole argument for private universities was the one presented above.
Since that is obviously not the case, and since Mr. Thornton never claimed it was, why can’t you just accept the article for what (to me) it obviously is?; statistical support for an already theoretically sound argument.
Because, Dave, that would be reading in more than is justified. On the one hand the author presented or referred to no such theoretical argument, and on the other what he did put does not stand as it is, from incompleteness in not covering the full range and checking just what else could be happening – and it is part of the rigorous assessment to point out gaps like that. After all, the actual examples I offered, Oxford and Cambridge, do not simply get their success from their autonomy but also vice versa. In fact, historically they started out with limited autonomy under patronage and gained more autonomy later from their success (an autonomy which is now being eroded, as it has been for a bit over a century). That shows which of this chicken and egg pair came first in those particular cases.
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