All of Our Eggs in Too Few Baskets?

America's premier research universities are the gears turning our nation's economic engine. Dotted across the landscape of America are great institutions where professors, fellows, and students are working to better our lives. Universities, both public and private, are responsible for researching and developing many of the technological advances we have experienced in the past 75 years. These advancements are not cheap; research and development facilities are expensive investments. As a result, those institutions with greater financial support are able to continue to drive innovation better than those who are lacking in great endowments.

In The Great American University, Cole writes that large endowments are one of the essential components to a great institution (1). As with many things in our society, success breeds success, and likewise a large endowment is associated with perceived quality. Right now, our nation's universities are seeing the greatest disparity between endowments than ever before. The top dozen or so universities have endowment holdings that far exceed the remaining 400 research universities combined (2). When you separate out the public and private institutions, the disparity among the top dozen is even greater with privates such as Harvard and Yale out-pacing public schools such as University of Michigan and University of Texas easily. Competition for resources is fierce and this disparity in endowment size gives a few institutions a great advantage. The fruit of the collective research labor from the top universities is great, and Cole mentions many of those achievements throughout his book. However, what happens when we shrink the number of successful research universities from several hundred to just a few dozen, or worse, just the current top ten?

This brings to light the question: are we placing too much money and resources into too few institutions? What happens when we realize we have lost a lot of great talent to foreign institutions who are willing to throw big dollars at research and development? To shrink our nation's ability to innovate and drive technological advances is committing economic suicide. Forcing people to leave the country to conduct research or dissuading future researchers from even entering these fields is not a sound long-term plan for our nation's success. What measures, if any, do you think should be taken by the top universities to lessen this disparity of wealth?

1. Page 113, The Great American University.
2. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/04/education/04endowment.html
3. 2008 Endowment numbers, comparing private vs public universities: http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/04/20/education/edlife/20080420_EDULIFE_PRINCETON_GRAPHIC.html