A lot is said about the American system of research and higher education. It is not always easy to distinguish what is relevant, amidst the clichés and inaccuracies conveyed by the mainstream media. It is worth, therefore, trying to understand the mysteries of that huge, diverse, complex world. Let's start with a simplified, stylized description of the set.
The American system, although poorly coordinated nationally, has the shape of a pyramid. At the top, there are a hundred “type I” research universities – they concentrate 70% of research funds, 70% of doctorates. Two thirds of these schools are public, state schools, the rest are made up of non-profit foundations. A little lower, but still on the upper level, there are two or three hundred “type II” research universities, receiving the rest of the research funds and generating the other 30% of doctorates. On this upper floor, private schools (all non-profit) have proportionally more students in postgraduate and professional schools (medicine, law, engineering) than in undergraduate education (college). And in them the college It is heavily concentrated in a few specialties, the most demanded. Public schools cannot do this – they need to offer a very wide range of careers, including the less “noble” and cheaper ones. Thus, private schools, including famous ones, are relatively small and focused, in a system that has 5 or 6 institutions and close to 20 million students. Princeton has less than 10 thousand students, Harvard has about 22 thousand. The Los Angeles unit of the University of California (UCLA) alone has twice that amount – and a range of specialties (careers) three times greater.
On the floor immediately below, there are a large number of so-called “comprehensive” schools (state colleges and universities), offering numerous degrees (bachelor's degree) and some master's degrees, specializations. And finally, at the base of the pyramid, there is a huge network of two-year colleges ou community colleges, open access, offering short courses (advanced degrees e CERTIFICATES). It is through them that almost half of “freshmen” enter the magical world of higher education. This capillarity of the system is one of the secrets to expanding access.
By the way: all these schools charge annual fees from students – including public ones. However, since at least the Second World War, the number of scholarships has been very large - I leave these details to the reader of my book.
We have another way of seeing this universe when we take the data collected by the Profiles of American Colleges, a publication by Barrons publishing house aimed at guiding the “consumer public” in this area, that is, students’ families. I make an adaptation to summarize the argument. There you can see a profile of its incoming and outgoing students, that is, the fruits of the tree – where the “freshmen” come from and what results they obtain. And the portrait – in a total of 1416 schools selected by Barrons – is thought-provoking:
Public money: fuel. War: catalyst
Well, how does all this hold up? How were their assets and structures built over time? From the outset, a decisive component was the injection of public resources. This comes from the colony, with the donation of land and exemption from taxes. But those were small schools, very small, including the famous Harvard, Yale, Princeton. After the Civil War came something significant – the donation of land from the federal government. Huge amounts of land were donated to institutions (public and private) to create a heritage to be explored over time. Thus, the land grant universities, still known today by the acronym “A&M” (agriculture and mechanics). The donation of land was decisive for universities and railways. These two ventures occupied the west and south, in a way “reinventing” the country.
Then came the GI Bill, the veterans' “Marshall Plan”, a sea of grants for 8 million World War II veterans. The academic system doubled in size, with federal money. Reissues of this plan occurred with clashes in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf. This mountain of federal money completely redefined the system.
The war, however, did not only provide resources for teaching. He built facilities and funded most of the relevant research in the United States. including industrial research. We are talking about hot wars and cold wars, the one that was waged in the arms race against the “reds” and, today, in the war against “deterritorialized” enemies (transnational terrorist groups).
The pattern of research funding draws attention. Some time ago, Richard Nelson and his colleagues made a history of this financing, for the post-war years. It's in your Technology and Economic Development, published in Brazil by Forense. Using more recent data, I created the graph below (National Science Board, [Science and Engineering Indicators – 1996] ). It is taken from a set I put together for a book of mine that is in print (International higher education models, Editora Unesp).
In the aforementioned book, using the same data sources, I do some tests to highlight the differences between what each sector finances and what each of them executes. In general, industry, universities and independent centers execute more than they finance – the federal government finances more than it executes. The federal government systematically funds research in industry, universities and centers and institutes linked to universities. Furthermore, from 1980 onwards, to help this transfer of dollars, tax exemption laws subsidized research supposedly financed by industry.
It is instructive to look at data from a notable institution, MIT. Let’s look at the graph below, taken from a commemorative university publication:
The title we introduced in the chart is a provocation. But how would we answer this question? It's possible that the picture of the top ten research universities looks a lot like this. It is also possible that the portrait of the 120 research universities is something similar to this. Hence, it makes sense to ask what they are, who supports them and who they serve. What do we have, reflected in that budget: a higher education school that researches and trains researchers? Or a research center that subsidizes researchers’ courses?
Yes, MIT may seem less like a school that does research and more like a center that sells research to sponsors and maintains, as an annex, a staff school. A tremendous school, by the way.
If we go back in time, we also become aware of other relevant factors. MIT was one of several private schools that received land from the 10th century federal program. Then, during World War II, it was the source of massive “programmed research” funds from the Department of Defense (DOD), something that continued during the Cold War. And it continues like this, even though another source, also federal, has taken over the DOD as a supplier of resources – this is the health system, concentrated in the NIHS (national health institutes). Military research, as we know, has notable side effects for civilian production. The massive financing of the computer industry was decisive, for decades, in making it generate and popularize computers for civilian use (and the internet, the daughter of a military program, Arpanet). The aviation industry saw the Boeing and DC-52 evolve from the B-XNUMX and Douglas bombers. When the federal government pays for the project and the aircraft prototype, it guarantees the resulting civil fleet. Profit factory. Although exaggerated by military hawks, this spin off it's real. In almost every everyday product we can imagine.
The “business model” that finances MIT is thus the result of a very peculiar circumstance, almost certainly unrepeatable. And very focused on two or three dozen large American schools. It cannot be extrapolated to a policy for a country. But the injection of public resources (state, federal, local) is decisive for the functioning of the academic pyramid, including its private arms.
Within this context, it is worth looking at a summary picture of the internal economy of the institutions. Let us note that for schools private non-profit organization, the participation of the resource is absolutely essential public for your support. Public money exceeds the value of annual fees and fees. But the public coffers also directly subsidize private, for-profit institutions. The table below, adapted from a 2008 book (Weisbrod, Burton et al. - Mission and Money – Understanding the University, Cambridge University Press) would need to be updated. From what I have gathered from new sources, we would see an increase in the amounts injected by the public sector into the profitable sector, which managed to convince legislators and policy makers to greatly relax previous restrictions, in the famous Title IV of the Education Law. There are profitable schools that have 90% of their operating budget dependent on various official sources.
As I said, the model of top schools, like MIT, is not only unrepeatable – we are not going to invent other wars, cold or hot, to get replicas of those schools off the ground. It is also just one piece – not entirely representative, to say the least – of the whole of American higher education. A national education policy must have broader and more diverse criteria. Without context, the “example” risks turning into a caricature. MIT is admirable and teaches a lot, but MIT is not here, Oregon State University would say. Others could also say. Examples like the one at MIT should indeed be studied. Not to copy them, but to learn from them, contextualizing them. This may help us investigate which functional substitutes can emulate some of its successes, as well as avoid some of its problems and obstacles.
