According to economic studies, somewhere between 30 to 50 percent of the United States’ current gross national product is based on products and technologies that have their origin in the nation’s research laboratories. When you add up the role that computers, cell phones, digital television, lasers, GPS, penicillin, MRI and jet engines – to name just a few – play in modern life, the magnitude of the impact that half a century of public investment in research and development becomes readily apparent.
The cornerstone of this long-running success story has been America’s research universities. Not only have the advances in knowledge on which many of these innovations been based come from university laboratories, but universities have also educated most of the scientists and engineers who have gone to work in the corporate research laboratories where this new knowledge has been transmuted into the products that have shaped modern life.
As a result, American research universities are widely recognized as the best in the world and many other countries are actively trying to emulate their success. At the same time, however, a growing number of U.S. observers are worried that the unique federal-state-university partnership which has made all this possible is crumbling. In 2009, this concern led a group of U.S. Senators and Congressmen, including Senator Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), to commission the National Research Council (NRC) to assess the competitive position of American research universities and recommend the top ten actions needed to maintain the nation’s primacy in research and doctoral education.
In response, the NRC put together a committee of leaders from academia, industry and government. The committee’s report has just been released under the title, “Research Universities and the Future of America: Ten Breakthrough Actions Vital of Our Nation’s Prosperity and Security.”
Committee members comment on the report in the following video (see if you can spot the Vanderbilt scenes in the background):
In the report, the committee agrees that the concerns for the future are justified. “Despite their current global leadership, American research universities are facing critical challenges. First, their financial health is endangered as each of their major sources of revenue has been undermined or contested.” In addition, “U.S. universities face growing competition from their counterparts abroad, and the nation’s global leadership in higher education,unassailable for a generation, is now threatened.”
It also lays out its top ten recommendations for actions that the federal and state governments and the universities need to take to revitalize this critical partnership. These recommendations include:
- The federal government should adopt stable and effective policies, practices and funding for university performed R&D and graduate education. Specifically, Congress and the Administration should provide full funding authorized the American COMPETES Act that would double the level of basic research conducted by the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Standards and Technology and the Department of Energy. In addition, they propose that the President break out a science and technology budget that is benchmarked against R&D spending by the nation’s economic competitors.
- In the short term, state governments should move rapidly to provide their public research universities with the autonomy that they need to survive during an extended period of limited support. State support has dropped by an average 25 percent in the last 20 years. In the long term, states should restore funding to 1980’s levels, adjusted for inflation.
- The role of business in the research partnership should be strengthened in ways that accelerate the transfer of new knowledge into valuable goods and services. The federal government can assist by expanding types of university support that promote collaboration and innovation and by implementing new tax policies that reward business when it partners with universities. In addition, business and universities should work together to develop new graduate degree programs that address workforce gaps.
- Research universities should set “bold goals” for containing costs and increasing productivity. One of these goals should be to ratchet down on the cost-inflation of their operations to the national inflation rate or lower. They also need to be more aggressive in incorporating modern instructional methods such as cyber learning.
You can download a free pdf of the report or of a summary or view interviews with members of the committee at the National Academies Press website.
The report has been generating a fair amount of commentary and coverage:
USA Today: Column: 10 steps to rescuing our research universities
R&D Magazine: Report: Research universities essential for U.S. prosperity, security Science: Universities, Key to Prosperity
Association of American Universities: NRC Study of Research Universities