Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities? (2020)
nber.org> Combined with sorting dynamics that concentrated talent and resources at some schools—and the emergence of tenure—this enhanced research performance.
Something tells me this is only part of the story. Yes, after several wars we took in scientists who subsequently brought new ideas, improved teaching, etc to the country.
But this ignores the biggest factor: US universities have tremendous endowments [1]. Having deployable capital that is larger than the GDP of some nations helps not only with the acquisition of the absolute best, but also the maintenance of programs who may not have an obvious path to profit. Moreover US students pay more for their tuition than any other country in the world, further factoring in to the availability of money that can be used for such purposes. Additionally, the US spends the most capital on R&D by the dollar than any other country [2].
In the end, it comes down to money. It doesn't matter if you grow the talent if you can simply purchase the best from where ever it happens to grow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_colleges_and_universit...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/021715/what-country...
Saw the title and was immediately confused about why the answer to this question isn't just money. Turns out it is. US universities are benefited by subsidies from the US government and large grants from the private sector. Much of that capital is a direct result of the advantage gained by both US colonial interests abroad and by the US not suffering the infrastructure damage most of the rest of the wealthy world experienced as a result of WWII.
Edited to add: the brain drain from Europe to the US during WWII is also a factor. We ended up with a disproportionate number of foreign scientists during that period as well.
These are all good points. But what's interesting is that very similar things could also be said about the US healthcare system. And yet unlike American universities, it's not clear that American hospitals or healthcare is worldclass.
Where we fall down is on our convoluted system of billing and opaque pricing. The actual care in my experience is top notch.
To give you an idea, I can pay $60 for a FaceTime call with an urgent care clinic. That exact same call is billed to my insurance for $200 or 333.3334% more than what I would pay. An inhaler is priced at $70 at my local pharmacy, but can be had for $15 with a co-pay (God knows what they’re billing insurance for the “rest”) or $12 without insurance and just a coupon I picked up from a doctor rendering one of the “benefits” of my insurance moot. I’m pretty sure the inhaler itself can’t be more than a dollar to manufacture, but whatever, the pharmacist has to get paid, right?
Really? Few would argue that America has the best healthcare system but the healthcare, hospitals and medical education are, perhaps, unsurpassed.
It’s actually related. While the system itself may be broken the healthcare, when available, is second to none in the world.
This, once again, owing to the exorbitant amount of money spent on healthcare both by the public and the government. A lot of people seem surprised that our government spends way more money on healthcare than a lot of other countries and yet the system disenfranchises the vast majority of its consumers.
In fact, US citizens subsidize the healthcare of other countries as well. The money we are forced to spend on absurd medicine costs goes directly into making it cheaper in other parts of the globe. The standard for treatment and care is decided in the US at the expense of her citizens, and then it is offloaded to the rest of the world where it becomes cheap. Doctors from other parts of the world go to medical school in the US, once again subsidized by citizens, and then go home and take that knowledge with them. If other countries paid their “fair share” it would likely result in total medical costs going down in the US.
If you need a pill, go to another country. If you need treatment for an extremely rare disease there is no better place than the US (supposing you can afford it). This isn’t so much a complaint despite myself being a victim of the system, but rather the reality of it. America subsidizes the cheap healthcare of the rest of the world. This is why, on a practical level, a system on par with Europe in the US is fiscally intractable. To both subsidize the world and continue to lead the standard of treatment and care, the taxpayer would be on the hook for an absurd amount of money. I’ve yet to see an accurate tax burden calculation but I’d imagine it would be several dozen trillion a year, or around a flat 800-1000% increase in current taxes along with trimming the budgetary fat.
If that world class healthcare is only accessible to a small percentage of americans, does america really have world class healthcare?
It's useful to separate, as the parent commenter did, the notion of healthcare quality (for those who can afford it), and the state of public health.
It's only useful in that it allows the US to still claim they have good healthcare. I disagree that it has any other utility.
You're ignoring, willfully or not, that the notion of a good quality of healthcare is useful in many dimensions, e.g. where you might want to go to learn cutting-edge techniques and best practices, or receive them if you can afford them.
The US had some of the best hospitals in the world, often because they are associated with the best research universities.
The problem with US healthcare is distribution (a similar but less acute problem exists in education) and efficiency (same).
In fact you could argue that US healthcare priorities being so similar to our education priorities (i.e. spend a bunch of resources on the absolute best, particularly infinitely scalable research like pharmaceuticals, but then hope and pray for the underfunded rest) is what causes a lot of the criticism people levy against US healthcare.
Most American universities aren't worldclass either. I'm not even sure if the average quality is higher than that of the rest of the developed world
But the US seems to have worldclass outliers in just about any field you can think of.
US Healthcare system is very good at what it does. It just isn't doing the right thing. Looking at it another way, the US healthcare system is far better at bringing in revenue than any other country's healthcare system, but like a factor of two.
The Mayo Clinic gets 8,000 international patients a year. That’s quite a few people who are willing to take a flight and pay our high prices for medical care.
“Worldclass only if you can afford it” isn’t wordclass. One should look at how the system helps the poor, not the rich.
How is the comparison to GDP relevant? GDP is the amount of good and services a country produced in a year expressed in some currency. An endowment is an amount of money? Totally different things I would say? But I have seen this type of phrasing a lot in the media. I don’t understand the connection.
It's not really a comparison, but more so used to show you the perspective of the university's deep pockets and just how deep they are.
If a single university has a bigger endowment than the entire monetary value of produced goods and services of a country for a whole year, it gives you perspective on what that money can do when poured specifically into a single purpose (education, R&D, attracting academic talent, etc)
Well having a large endowment allows you to have a larger budget and spend more on salaries, research, instruction, etc. For example, Harvard with the largest endowment had ~$5 billion in operating expenses in 2021. That alone is more than the entire GDP of more than 50 countries. So Harvard by itself spent more money than the entire economies of 24% of the worlds countries.
It's about expectations. Most folks expect that the GDP of a country would be a larger number than the endowment of any one thing. It's no deeper than that.
How do you feel about comparing debt to GDP?
It’s a better metric because GDP gives some insight in the potential income of a country. Although it must be coupled with current tax % to be really useful. Debt usually has monthly or yearly payments, GDP refers to yearly income. In that sense I see a relation. An endowment is just a pile of money, I don’t see a time element there.
> Debt usually has monthly or yearly payments
Sovereign debt, the kind that is typically compared to GDP only pays out interest periodically, not the principal.
Frankly, I find the basic premise of this paper - the explanation for US academic excellence lies in resource allocation and management - questionable. I'd be more interested in a theory of political scientists who explain it as a function of political power. Considering that Germany was the world's research powerhouse in the 19th century, I'd like to see the hypothesis 'You can't have the best universities in the world if you start two world wars and lose them' tested as well.
Are you suggesting the US should start and lose some world wars in order to test that hypothesis?
The things people will do for science!
At this point world war 2 ended almost 80 years ago. Most of the nations have since recovered and are quite rich. Something else is there.
My point is that it's about political weight, and in that regard Germany is still a long shot from where it was the 19th century. Political power comes into play in two ways: one, the research being done in the US is truly excellent, but secondly, research done outside the US is arguably being underrated. Looking at Germany again, a lot of the cutting-edge work is being done outside universities in places like Max Planck Institutes, which would arguably deserve to be high up in any global ranking. In reality, however, they're not even included in most rankings (eg US News, THE, QS, ARWU) because they don't fit into the university-centric model of how research is being done in the US.
The point is simple: if you can impose your standards on others of what it means to excel in any discipline (and that's what I mean by political power), you're much more likely to come out on top in any comparison. And then you can harvest a lot of objective benefits as well from the best people wanting to move to the places that come out on top.
As a US academic at a prestigious institution, I find it surprising how few of my close colleagues and collaborators are US born- a very small percentage (maybe 10-20%?). In some sense it makes sense that if our institutions are best, the globally best researchers would all come here. If it were a true meritocracy, I guess we would expect ~4-5% of US academics to be US born, given that it's our percentage of the world population, but in practice there are huge obstacles for foreigners to come and work here and succeed.
> few of my close colleagues and collaborators are US born- a very small percentage (maybe 10-20%) [..] If it were a true meritocracy, I guess we would expect ~4-5% of US academics to be US born, given that it's our percentage of the world population
It's unrelated to meritocracy. It's just that a significant portion of the world population lives under conditions that are too poor to be able to develop extraordinarily smart people in significant quantities that are able to compete with other smart people born in rich countries. In other words, if you are poor, have poor access to sanitation and nutritious food, you'll be at a severe disadvantage to develop the skills needed to be a top researcher.
We don’t live in a meritocracy even just in our own country. It’s a myth that is used to justify bad behavior.
We also don't live in the antithesis of a meritocracy either.
Competency is usually rewarded, and rewards are pretty well correlated with competency.
There's plenty of room in the tails one can cite to justifyany opinion on the matter, but on average I think we're far more meritocratic than not.
On the scale of nepotism<->meritocracy, the US is probably much closer to meritocracy than most human societies have been.
Are there examples of societies who have done meritocracy better, from which we can take ideas to improve our own system?
Do you think this remains true with DIE and affirmative action being implemented in all major employers, universities and institutions? It is not fashionable to point to the unmeritocratic treatment of Asians and white males, so I guess I will point out the emperors nakedness.
Hiring people of all backgrounds that agree with a forced marxist outcome (diversity), firing people dissenting to Marxist forced outcome or shutting them up (inclusion), and a forced marxist outcome (equity) never lead to meritocracy in other places. Why would it here?
Likewise, affirmative action in hiring and research grants favor a less productive woman or a less competent person with the right identity category. Affirmative action categories are from the 60s when the US had a very different demographic, and whom held high status office jobs looked very different.
Your comment is unpopular, judging from the downvotes, but it is still thoughtful and should be debated, not simply downvoted. But you are touching topics that come close to religious faith for some folks, and in an irreverent way.
Marxism actually is a theology and by proxy wokeness as well, so it is not surprising you get religious zealots.
I wish more people in the tech spoke up against DIE. Corporations are acting as a proxy of Government policies that do not pass the muster of legislative process. It is seems like either 1) Everyone is brainwashed by the woke religion or 2) People know it is malicious but don't have the courage to speak up.
Of all the people, I would expect technologists to have a very straight forward, rational and objectivist perspective, but I am realizing that it might not be the case.
It's the ESG framework that force companies to adopt DIE, kill it and you kill DIE. The marxists are using the large pension funds they manage (blackrock, vanguard, state and federal pension funds etc) to force companies to either seek a high ESG score or see these funds money used as leverage to tank their stock. This is actually illegal, as it's both racketeering and corporations&funds are required to seek profit.
Every wondered how oil, coal and weapons companies could have a high ESG score? It's because it's a scam to benefit the cartels controlling the scores.
In practice ESG stands for sustainability of the political regime (Environmental), compliance with marxist values and social justice programs (Social) and compliance with the desired principles of the ruling government (Government). DIE is part of the S and G.
> Do you think this remains true with DIE and affirmative action being implemented in all major employers, universities and institutions?
Meritocracy is about how government employees (or those who aren't legally "employees" per se, but who still have the political power) are chosen, not about how students or private employees are chosen. (c.f. how the existence of religious schools doesn't imply the country is a theocracy, the existence of CEOs doesn't imply the country is an autocracy, etc.)
Meritocracy actually is about how students or private employees are chosen, since the word is typically used to apply to the entire society of the USA, not just its government.
So yeah, if all schools were suddenly uber-Catholic and dissuaded non-Catholics for example, then that would mean the society has become less meritocratic. Or if companies had racial preferences in hiring instead of hiring based on merit and achievement, and this was widespread, then the US could not be said to be a meritocracy.
This is not a legal or governmental discussion, this is about sociology, anthropology, and culture.
Good points. Also, constitutional constraints apply to public schools and universities so they are not supposed to push a state religion such as marxist theology. It is also illegal to fire someone or discriminate against them for not adopting a faith.
Right now the job is to make more aware that marxism and by proxy wokism doesn't just look like a religion, it is a religion and has a clear theology, so constitutional protections against state religions apply and this should stop the woke abuse of political power for religious aims.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqj-MKG9SnU&t=1s
Likewise constitutional protections apply against enforcement of the marxist faith using DIE.
Right. Constitutional protections are the bare minimum for government to follow. There exist configurations of current society with all constitutional protections in place that still leave a lot to be desired. Unfortunately, modern political discourse is obsessed with government and less obsessed with polities, which is really sad, because government is actually a small part of society.
Absolutely. Marxism is an odd cult that slipped past a lot of protections that should have applied to it.
Persons from any faith that worships the state becoming a manifestation of its perfect idol and does the work (praxis) to make it so, should not be allowed any role in it as they would not adhere to the separation of church&state.
DIE is also implemented all over the government, and public schools and universities also apply it. Are you saying you are concerned about this affecting meritocracy, but not in private schools and companies?
Your definition of meritocracy to be related only to those that have political power is not a universal definition. Merriam Webster defines it as "a system, organization, or society in which people are chosen and moved into positions of success, power, and influence on the basis of their demonstrated".
But let's go with just political power. Are you saying that getting a high-status private education, eg. harvard or yale, or a high power private company role has no influence on you wielding political power?
> Are you saying you are concerned about
No, I haven't said anything about my concerns nor did I intend to.
> DIE is also implemented all over the government
That would make for a better argument with some examples, instead of pointing to universities and private institutions etc.
> Are you saying that getting a high-status private education, eg. harvard or yale, or a high power private company role has no influence on you wielding political power?
No. But "influence > 0" is not the correct criterion.
I think I am a bit confused then. We were discussing meritocracy. Are you claiming affirmative action or DEI has no effect on meritocracy? Or that meritocracy in your opinion shouldn't be a consideration?
> That would make for a better argument with some examples, instead of pointing to universities and private institutions etc.
Why do you think public universities and schools are not government? They are under political founding, oversight, funding, and control so that doesn't make sense to me.
>No. But "influence > 0" is not the correct criterion.
What is the correct criterion in your opinion?
> Are you saying that you think DIE is justified in government, universities and private institutions? Trying to understand your position here
Sorry, as I mentioned, it's not my intention to state my position on DIE here.
> Why do you think public universities and schools are not government? They are under political founding, oversight, funding, and control so that doesn't make sense to me.
You're binarizing things that aren't binary. It depends a lot on what you're talking about. e.g., K-12 and graduate school are not the same in this regard, and different universities/states are different. Public universities have quite a bit of independence from the government and politics; sometimes this is even literally written in the state constitutions. Moreover, institutions have lots of different funding sources. You can't just point at "the government is funding this therefore this is the government". The actual influence the government exerts on an entity compared to all the other influences on that entity is a huge factor here.
> What is the correct criterion in your opinion?
The influence has to be "large", for some sensible definition of large. That definition should probably compare the influence with other sources of influence somehow.
And if you're making a sweeping statement about the whole country, the criterion should probably include something that applies to a large chunk of the relevant institutions in the country.
> You can't just point at "the government is funding this therefore this is the government". The actual influence the government exerts on an entity compared to all the other influences on that entity is a huge factor here.
Public universities and K-12 are actually owned by state governments, and they are subject to FOIA and constitutional constraints like all government institutions. For instance, they are not supposed to push a state religion.
> The influence has to be "large", for some sensible definition of large. That definition should probably compare the influence with other sources of influence somehow.
So are you arguing that meritocratic considerations should be secondary to other considerations decided with political power?
I'm not a huge fan of the form DIE practices take almost every time I've run into them, and I'm often even appalled it's gotten to this point, but I also don't think it is an all-or-nothing proposition.
A metric of diversity being applied to selection really doesn't mean it's the sole criterion. The effect isn't negligible, but neither is it fully-like wannabe egalitarian marxist systems where your parent's job or political affiliations forever determined your future status without negotiation.
There's definitely a scale between a meritocratic and egalitarian society.
How do you think about DEI and affirmative action systematically discriminating against poor people from poor families with unfavored identities?
The problem is that although there is for instance merit to helping the poor, that is in direct conflict with DIE that will choose Colin Powell’s son over a multi-generation poor white son of a black father any day.
Likewise, affirmative action will choose to give Hillary Clinton’s daughter research funding over an Asian male from a poor railroad worker family.
If one really cared about class or generational injustice, then the poor white male and Asian male in the examples above would have not been systematically discriminated against using DIE&affirmative action
Capital is usually rewarded, and rewards are pretty well correlated with capital.
Depends on the sort of rewards.
Saudi Arabia does not seem to be rewarding scientists or inventors and doesn't consequently get any significant scientific results at home, even though the country is obscenely rich.
Ah yes, the US universities are well known to hire the wealthiest elites as researchers. Poor foreign grad students are virtually absent from US universities.
What are you on about? If you read the parent comments, we are talking about country-wide generalisms.
Which are clearly false when applied to the actual topic of discussion, so why bring them up?
There are huge obstacles for foreigners to move to the US and work, but higher education is also one of the most straightforward paths to the immigration pipeline (afaik as someone who's never dealt with it themselves). I believe that indicates there are two opposing forces, so the relative proportions being off would likely be expected as we don't know which force is stronger.
I don't think even the most Pollyanna-ish perspective claims that there's a global meritocracy. The smashing success of merit-based immigrants in high-income countries is a pretty undeniable signal that we're nowhere near the point where the marginal legal immigrant is less "meritorious" than the pop avg.
I'm personally willing to bite the whole bullet and am an open-borders advocate. But it's a mistake to think that supporters of border restrictions aren't aware that they're explicitly anti-meritocratic.
Immigrant populations aren’t generally uniform random samples of the rest of the world’s population. People with wealth, social capital, high levels of education (which correlates with family background), extraordinary athletic ability, etc. have a generally easier time of immigrating to this (or probably most) countries.
Anti-immigration lobbies have tended to caricature and scapegoat low skilled, low income, “undesirables;” while touting their support for (limited) immigration of high skilled, well-heeled immigrants as evidence of that they aren’t simply against foreigners.
Yes, my comment doesn't assume a uniform sample.
In fact, it's predicated on there being a substantial filter applied to legal immigrants, such that they are highly successful in their destination country.
The performance gap between legal immigrants and natives is sizable, implying that marginal extra immigrants from loosening this filter would still outperform natives.
And the marginal extra immigrant outperforming the median native means that claims of a global meritocracy are farcical.
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> while touting their support for (limited) immigration of high skilled, well-heeled immigrants as evidence of that they aren’t simply against foreigners.
As mentioned, your comment isn't too related to my point. But to follow the tangent: This perspective seems like a consistent and defensible worldview? Wanting a Canada-like system that prioritizes economically-productive immigration is absolutely evidence against a bias against foreigners per se.
(I don't share this worldview. I think borders are something close to a crime against humanity. But I'm aware that mine is a radical position. The anti-immigrant boogeyman you describe sounds like a fairly logical extrapolation of a general belief in borders)
Hm, I confess I don’t understand what you are talking about. Who is claiming that there is a global (or even national) meritocracy? What is meritocracy?
Do immigrants outperform natives? On what metrics?
Let’s suppose, as a thought experiment, said immigrants outperform natives at being seven feet tall, since maybe we need them for some set of tasks and we are short of seven footers. If we preferentially admit seven footers and find that immigrants statistically outperform natives at being tall, I don’t see that we’ve necessarily disproven all forms of meritocracy.
It's the top of the thread, the comment that I replied to and was referring to.
> If it were a true meritocracy, I guess we would expect ~4-5% of US academics to be US born, given that it's our percentage of the world population, but in practice there are huge obstacles for foreigners to come and work here and succeed.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32595436
My claim was that even avid restrictionists don't claim a global meritocracy. They are optimizing other axe: Volk-style prioritization,cultural stability, etc.
>I'm personally willing to bite the whole bullet and am an open-borders advocate. But it's a mistake to think that supporters of border restrictions aren't aware that they're explicitly anti-meritocratic.
I'm an immigrant to the US. I support tight border restrictions because the current status quo regarding the Mexican border, visa overstays, and emphasis on family reunification makes it harder for the US to have a truly meritocratic system, which would be something akin to the points-based systems of Canada and Australia.
I agree with you more than you'd think. I'm aware that my open-borders belief is a radical one, and I accept the dramatic implications and knock-on effects.
But the vast majority of people accept the legitimacy of restricted immigration. IMO the line of moral revulsion they draw between your view and their own is largely illusory. Once you've accepted that you're selecting immigrants, it seems nonsensical to me that your selection criteria should consist of a) rigid and horrifyingly Kafkaesque processes for 99% of countries and b) an inconsistent drip of unselected migrants from an adjacent country (through a process that puts them at substantial physical risk).
Frankly, I'm a little contemptuous of people with this perspective. They don't seem to have thought through their belief that we should restrict the border, but do a shitty job of it in random ways.
I think its because advanced degrees fast track the immigration process, and the better paying jobs are in the US. Those born in the US get a bachelors degree and then a job (probably to pay off the student debt). For a non-US born person with a bachelors degree, it is far more difficult to find a job in the US, so they apply for a MS/PhD program. Then the MS/PhD programs are full of foreign nationals, and naturally the academic R&D jobs pull from that pool made up of mostly non-US persons.
Throughout history, the leading empire or nation (by GDP) has always had the best universities. Also the best music industry, the best visual arts, etc. Ok, that's just what GDP measures, so it's a bit tautological. (Or is it?)
It sure as hell isn't whatever policy these authors determined was most likely out of the 3 or 4 they considered using regression over a time period containing one observation of the dependent variable.
(Reading the abstract, it seems the above charactization is even generous.)
Hopefully the next great center of research will have higher standards for what is subsidized than we have in the U.S. today.
Not really. Austro-Hungarian Empire was an undisputed leader in music and one of the top in visual arts too, while it's economy was absolutely sucking, and technologies terribly outdated.
You're referring to Vienna. It's broadly part of Europe and narrowly functions as its own city-state. Its intermediate allegiance may be less important.
It's long had outsized musical influence but was only the world leader in music during the classical period, roughly 1750-1820. This does not overlap Austria-Hungary. However, I don't know the economic output of the Habsburg monarchy relative to the rest of Europe, so it may still be an exception.
US government funding of university research and operations is a very important factor. In 2018, almost $150 billion USD in total was invested in universities.
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/colleges-and-universities/
https://www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-pounds-us-u...
I’m told that we don’t spend anything on education so this must be false.
The US chronically underfunds pre-college education. Universities are typically flush with money coming from grants usually from the government but also rich people. Often a large fraction of the grant money a professor obtains is siphoned off to dean's lush funds which help support education, hiring top professors, etc.
It’s rare for a large fraction of grant money to be siphoned to a Dean’s discretionary fund. Typically some smallish fraction (maybe 10%, often significantly less) of indirect costs (which, depending on the funder and the negotiated F&A rate may be anywhere from 0% or nearly 100% on top of the direct costs that fund the research staff and materials, etc.) goes back to the subdivision overseen by that Dean to do with as they please. Everywhere I’ve worked, that amounts to a few (low single digit) percent of total costs being used in the way you describe. And many places return none of indirects to the unit overseeing the PI and so then it’s a cool zero percent.
> The US chronically underfunds pre-college education
Not true, US spends more on pre-college education than nearly any other country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
yes, but that spend isn't well distributed, and things are more expensive in the US (I assume your nubers are not corrected for the price index of each country).
That's true, but generally the worst school districts are the ones that get the most money, although the exact way money is distributed varies by region. For instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district describes how NJ gives tons of money to schools in poor areas, although it does not seem to have produced any better educational outcomes.
Does "get the most money" equate to "has the most money?"
Not sure what the difference is. But it does seem that no matter how much money you throw at a problem with no measurable impact, there will always be people claiming just a little bit more is needed because this time something will be different and it won't be squandered.
How much of that "money thrown at the problem" is actually used to pay teachers more and attract competent teaching talent and give the teachers proper resources they don't have to buy with their own money and providing needy students the help they need to succeed?
I already know the answer, because many in my family are lifelong teachers. All money goes to facilities that don't always need it, though are still good investments, and administration.
The current process sure works well to say "well we keep throwing money at it and nothing improves" as if you can LITERALLY just throw money in the general direction of the problem and see an improvement. As long as those prioritizing funds and resources continue to just ignore teachers wholesale, we will see no improvement in education.
It'll be interesting to see how far things can go before people stop making these arguments. It's the same argument people made 20 years ago. Yet spending keeps going up without results. Check back in another 20, I predict "equity" will be as far away as today but a lot more money will be spent and the public discourse will be the same.
Also, there are different regions and schools where different ways of spending money have been tried. The best results you'll find in the literature are temporary improvements that wash out by the end of high school. The worst results are not even that.
Investment clearly works across all facets of our economy. It could work, in schools, too. But our society will never allow for what it really takes to adequately use the funding given to it.
It's not surprising students did better as they were younger. Poor districts expose children to bad outcomes earlier leading to poor performance in school, obviously during the teenage years.
I don't think it's clear that every problem can be solved by spending more money on it. In this case, if the root cause of the problem is outside the school, then the school may not be able to do much about it even given infinite funding.
There's obviously a threshold - some amount of expenditure is needed. You need a certain amount of capital.
Obviously we're past that point at many places, and not enough in others. But if the underlying issue is poverty outside the classroom, I don't see how lack of money isn't the cause.
We have very clear evidence money solves a lot of problems. Why doesn't it work here? It works everywhere else in our capitalist economy.
In any case the difference is quite clear. If a school in a rich suburb doesn't get much federal money than, say, a inner city school, that gets a lot. That rich suburb already has money. They obviously wouldn't get further funding - but are likely much richer?
The numbers I cited before were total $ per pupil from all sources.
The numbers you cited also have a citation that leads to a 404 and are only for 1 year, in one specific state. Hard to draw any reasonable conclusion from that.
NJ has been doing it for decades, the Wikipedia article gives a pretty good overview. There's similar programs in other states, and many examples of poor/bad schools that get tons of funding. Such as basically every major city in the country.
Possibly entire states and nearly every city for decades is not enough time, success may be right around the corner!
Again, I'm just asking for actual data, I'm not invalidating your claim, I'm asking for real support of it. I pointed out the Wikipedia article's citation links to a 404 - so I can't even validate (nor did you.) You've just accepted your premise, and what I've found is, "success is never around the corner" for those who have already made up their minds.
Good luck!
Actual data of what? The Wikipedia article talks about of different things and links to a lot of different things. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%252C31&q=a... are plenty of papers about the Abbott districts, it's been going on for decades, and that's just about NJ, similar things have been done many places. And not even all by the government. Zuckerberg gave $100 million to Newark, Bill Gates tried a bunch of stuff, but I haven't heard much from them lately, maybe they reached the same conclusion after seeing what their money achieved.
>The US chronically underfunds pre-college education.
As streptomycin said, you are wrong.
New York City spends more per student than anywhere else in the US (<https://www.silive.com/news/2019/06/how-much-does-new-york-c...>). Baltimore, an incredibly poor and run-down city, spends the third most. #4-6 and #8 are all wealthy suburbs of Washington DC, but their schools are all far better than those of Baltimore or NYC on average, despite Baltimore spending slightly more per student and NYC spending 60-70% more.
Money can only do so much against dysfunctional families immersed in dysfunctional ethno-societal groups.
TL;DR In the US, primary education is a local matter
An interesting note here is that in the US, federal government dollars are not a major funding component of primary education (k-12). Less than 8% (around $60 billion) of the total cost comes from the federal government; the rest comes from state and local property taxes.
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statisti...
https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/how-is-k-12-education-fun...
Two US research university professors (presumably funded by a US federal agency, NBER) agreeing that the US has the best research universities doesn't seem very independent.
NBER is not a federal agency. It's a non-profit, whose funding is partially from the US gov via grants.
Gotcha, thanks for clarifying.
Well you can find rankings from across the world: THE, ARWU, QS, Leiden, etc that all show the same thing. US Universities dominate them.
I've wished at least 2 dozen times over the last decade that the nordics had better research universities. I spent a portion of my life in Finland and the quality of life is so much better there, I would say it's probably unattainable here (the reduced crime, the affordability of everything, lack of homelessness, a more well educated population, etc.). Unfortunately the research being done at the top universities there in the hard sciences are rudimentary compared to resources available here. I was quite interested in pursing a PhD in chemistry there, but the research labs I checked out had resources less than and not comparable to the undergraduate labs I had here.
As an American (who has spend time some time in Finland, btw), it is really strange how mediocre European Universities are. My children are travelers and I want them to try things so I thought, why not apply to some good school in Europe? And there are some good schools for sure. But it's hard to find a school in say Italy or Spain (which have some of the oldest Universities in the world) that can compete in research or faculty with say, University of California San Diego, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Mid-tier schools in the US punch way above their weight for some reason.
You are trying to apply a US-centric metric where it doesn't work. If you want research, you need to look elsewhere. Universities in Europe are usually for teaching and doing some broad research.
Highly specialized research on US levels is done at dedicated institutes like the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, Fresenius, CERN, and many more in collaborative efforts on the EU level.
Problem in Denmark is that every small town wants their own university.
You can't have 5 research universities in a country of 5 million people.
The same trend can be observed in Czechia.
The EU seems to be rather obsessed with achieving an end state where a huge proportion of people (like 50 per cent?) have a degree, but this necessary leads to dumbing down of the curriculum and emergence of mediocre colleges.
We already have people with bachelor degree who can barely write gramatically correct Czech, even though they are natives.
In Czechia is there not a difference between research and teaching institutions? In the US we have things like community colleges and other colleges/universities where you can get your associates or bachelors, but not Masters / PhD. They have a focus on teaching their students, rather than doing research.
Although maybe that's what you're considering "mediocre colleges"
Having one major one would be a good achievement for a country of 5 million.
In the US, Wisconsin, Colorado, Minnesota, South Carolina, and Alabama are the states with populations in the 5-million range. The University of Wisconsin, Colorado, and Minnesota are all AAU members, and each would comfortably be the finest university in every country on earth smaller than, say, Spain (40 million people). South Carolina and Alabama aren't as prestigious but both do quite credible jobs of serving as the flagship universities of their states.
> You can't have 5 research universities in a country of 5 million people.
Really? I'm counting at least 7 research universities (ranked <200 globally) in a country of 8 million people.
https://www.google.com/search?q=switzerland+population
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-global-universities/sw...
US spends more on education as a % of GDP than anywhere. Big Private schools with tons of money may actually not be egalitarian but it sure does bring out a lot of hard hitting talent. The US has a large, growing economy, which helps. And the US is very 'open' - both civilly (immigration) and culturally (association). Most nations don't have a lot of immigration and Europe, though very nice to it's immigrants, mostly has 'closed' cultures - even in Nordic countries and on the Continent. The French are ideologically egaalitarian but socially extremely closed. And then 2 massive wars in Europe to give the US the top spot, which, without some kind of disruption, is theirs to keep.
I don't see China taking the lead even as they start to graduate a zillion engineers and improve a lot otherwise. Especially with Xi's new authoritarianism.
European research is also distributed a bit differently which makes it harder to compare.
Could you expand on what it means to be culturally open or closed? Like, what's the 'lived experience' in both?
Civil things are laws, workplace, how you treat strangers in public and in professional settings.
Social things are culture, friends, etc. and obviously they overlap.
Europe is generally good to immigrants. They have nice laws, egalitarian policies, corporations that try to look beyond just hiring locals. Etc. etc..
But it's much harder for immigrants in Europe to 'fit in', to make friends, to participate in all the 3rd space stuff, to 'get the jokes', which means being invited to the 'thing', maybe it's a business thing, maybe not quite looked at for promotion etc.. And a lot of business is still done through social networks, a 'guy who knows a guy', from 'introductions'. I wouldn't say downright 'nepotism' but the Uncle who works at the Space Agency who puts his nephews name in for an internship etc..
So it's like 'marginalization by being an outsider' as opposed to any kind of negative or oppressive actions by the in group. (I'm not denying racism or whatever, just saying most things are not really overt, and it's more about people 'self selecting' people 'like them' as opposed to specifically disliking others).
The US is decidedly more open, they care a lot less where you come from and have more aggressive policies and actions at least in some places. Partially driven by ideology, partly just be greed (i.e. aggressively want the best talent), partly because there is less of a rooted culture.
France is very French. California doesn't have an established culture. There's no such thing as a 'Californian' by culture, just residence. If you grow up in france for 30 years, you spend the rest of your life saying "I'm French" because culturally, you are. But if you grow up in Cali and move to Florida, you don't go around saying "I'm Californian". Though you might say "From California" but that has a different meaning. Cali is more or less just a 'place'. Obviously it has hints of culture and obvious not everyone is treated 'equally' but it's fairly open.
Academia on the whole is generally more open I'd say but still, all the other things, i.e. grants, awards, tenure, etc. are going to be different.
In many European countries advanced research is not conducted in universities.
A few examples:
- Max-Planck-Gesellschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck_Society
- CERN https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CERN
- ITER https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
- Nederlandse Organisatie voor Toegepast Natuurwetenschappelijk Onderzoek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_Organisation_for_A...
Full text pdf here:
https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.35.1.185
It seems to be more about the development of the American university system during the 20th century rather than the current status of research in American academics (which is highly corporatized these days, with attendent quality and openness issues).
Also, the average quality of American universities isn't very high, from the paper:
> "The American system is well suited to producing top schools, although at the cost of inequality. To illustrate, del Corral (2020) compares the performance of Spain and the United States in a recent Academic Ranking of World Universities list often known as the “Shanghai ranking”... The United States accounts for 40 of the top 100 universities; Spain for 0. On the other hand, 83 percent of public Spanish universities (delivering in-person instruction) appear somewhere in the ranking that only 23 percent of their American counterparts do."
Surely the waves of massive European brain drain around WW2 and the fall of communism had something to do with it. It makes perfect sense that there would be compounding benefits to being the safest most powerful polity in human history.
> Why Does the U.S. Have the Best Research Universities?
Does it? What does "best" mean? If you look at any particular field in the sciences I am sure you will find several universities outside the U.S. with renowned/leading researchers from that field. (At least that's been the case in every field I've been in.)
The U.S. as a whole simply tends to have more researchers and participate in more fields than any other single country. But that's largely a matter of allocating resources, of which the U.S. and its universities obviously have plenty (more than any other country) for numerous reasons. But it doesn't say anything about the quality of the individual research being conducted.
"a set of intellectual property rights [is] explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime."
Europe in it's infinite wisdom decided to self immolate in two world wars. When the smoke cleared only the US was left standing. It took 30 years for European countries to get back prosperity and some of them never did.
Well, the wars before that caused the whole science thing to happen in the first place because of military usfulness.
Why does the Premier League have the best football players?
Ranking universities by operating revenue will result in a rather good approximation of the Times Higher Education World University Ranking.
1) Hitler did a favor to US, starting an idiotic xenophobic/racist campaign in Europe, causing bright scientists to flee in droves to seed US research institutions;
2) Once the British empire and later US became economic powerhouses, English became the de facto research language, what gave English-speaking researchers home turf advantage in access the research literature;
3) The budgetary constraints to universities are softened when they are backed by a government able to print the global trade currency.
> starting an idiotic xenophobic/racist campaign in Europe
Today, Asians are fighting for equality in US educational system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
This is most likely going to lead to striking down Affirmative Action. I suggest leaving emotions out of this and read the actual case materials. There is a lot of intellectual discourse, nuance and vigorious debate in those materials as well as amicus briefs. I love reading high profile lawsuits and this is one of them.
> Today, Asians are fighting for equality in US educational system
You seem to have read the details of the case, yet you say that Asian Americans are fighting for equality by citing a case that has determined at the lower level and appellate court that no systemic discrimination occurred.
Please don’t extend this meme… Asian Americans are doing just fine in admissions across the board at US institutions.
1. The appellate judge has confirmed the lower court ruling that no quota-based discrimination was found.
2. Even if true (it’s not), it is only at a some (10-20?) elite universities. It is definitely not systemic.
3. Harvard undergrad population is ~26% Asian American. US population is ~6%. This is not a perfect comparison for discrimination, but it hardly reeks of xenophobia (not really relevant for Asian Americans in the US) or racism.
4. The only reason this argument has any potential merit is because Asian Americans have higher average grades and SAT scores than the rest of the admitted population. This would indicate discrimination if those were the only admissions factors, but they are not (at Harvard, I believe SAT and grades would be part of one factor out of five that includes things like sports, and this is similar at several other elite schools).
5. Note that the “students for fair admissions” are hoping that the Supreme Court overturns the appellate court decision and thereby possibly ending affirmative action. Basically, their case is encouraging less overall diversity at elite schools for theoretical benefits to Asian Americans (note that imho it will backfire in a number of ways… look at what has happened to Stuyvesant and Berkeley for examples).
Grades and SAT scores are easy to understand for everyone. Furthermore, for kids whose parents came from East Asia, where entrance to elite universities is (for most entrants) exclusively exam-based, this is a very unintuitive system. The logic that some folks hold (both Asian Americans and non-Asian Americans) is that perfect grades and perfect SATs should get you into the best school, but that’s just not how the admissions systems at these elite schools work.
All of these schools talk about how they want a well-rounded student body, and the admissions materials make it clear that they are looking for a wider range of students beyond bookish brainiacs. I will add that if an applicant wants to get into an elite school based on academics, then grades and SATs are not enough to catch the attention of the admission committee — great grades and SATs alone only make an applicant look similar to thousands of other applicants.
Anyway, I wish the best of luck to anyone applying to an elite school. But if they do, I hope that they focus their application on something other than grades and SATs — they will have a tough time getting in otherwise.
> You seem to have read the details of the case, yet you say that Asian Americans are fighting for equality by citing a case that has determined at the lower level and appellate court that no systemic discrimination occurred.
"Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (Docket 20–1199) and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina (Docket 21-707) are a pair of lawsuits concerning racial discrimination in affirmative action programs in college admissions processes. "
It is though. It is alleging racial discrimination. It is literally the first line on Wikipedia.
> Please don’t extend this meme… Asian Americans are doing just fine in admissions across the board at US institutions.
That seems completely orthogonal.
I don't have a horse in this race. I am a bystander telling people to go look up the case materials and study them for yourself as a matter of intellectual curiousity. Not sure what is the cause for your defensiveness, I am not even arguing those nor am I interested in it. I'd say, the fact that urging people to seek facts is causing an uproar for defense and a lash out, should an indicator of importance of this case. Please read my first comment and see if there is anything but factual matter. There is no "meme" here. As per the facts of the case, plaintiffs are fighting for equality and alleging discrimination. That's not up for debate, whether you support for side or the other. We don't need to argue the case here on HN, that's being done for us by the brilliant lawyers on both sides for us :-).
> It is though. It is alleging racial discrimination. It is literally the first line on Wikipedia.
It is an allegation that has been determined twice by courts not to hold water.
People can allege anything, and they often do for political or pr reasons (politics being the real reason for this case, imho).
> Not sure what is the cause for your defensiveness
I have lived in Asian for 9 years of my profession life, and I am active in parts of the local Asian American community. My concern/defensiveness is that this claim of discrimination is widely repeated despite being refuted by the courts. I appreciate that you want people to read the case details themselves, but most people don’t do that, and they defer to people (like me and you) who do read the details for thought leadership.
In California, where I currently live, there are very real, irrefutable acts of discrimination happening against Asian Americans. These really need to be dealt with. Admissions at elite schools is not one of them, and repeating a claim on this topic that has not been supported by the courts or the case details (at least imho) is just adding fuel to the outrage fire as well as taking attention away from real discrimination that is happening.
That’s just my 2 cents. I don’t feel the need to persuade anyone in particular, but I really wish HN folks would discuss this topic in a more informed way. I add my contributions so that folks can see a more detailed/nuanced side to this issue that is rarely presented in the press. Do with it what you will.
> It is an allegation that has been determined twice by courts not to hold water.
That describes vast majority of SCOTUS cases. Not surprising. That's kind of how cases reach SCOTUS (except in rare occasions when SCOTUS grants writs of certiorari to a district court case).
I'll say something few will mention... but lack of a safety net is a large factor in why the US has the best research universities, and well -- the best everything [1]
Simply put the fact that you can slip to a pretty low bottom in the US (as opposed to the guaranteed safety net in some other countries) motivates those individuals capable of high achievement to produce the best research. This is why the US has basically the biggest companies, the best researchers, the most dominant pop-culture, etc. Basically, everyone knows that if you don't continue to pursue whatever it is, you can sink to the bottom, and there's not as strong a safety net.
It's also the source of America's constant 'self-improvement' and 'self-help' culture [2].
When people have a guarantee of a good life no matter what, they get complacent.
My explanation also explains why some of the most successful people come from such low backgrounds. For example, successful businessmen like Larry Ellison had some pretty tough childhoods. This makes sense, since those who've experienced such lows will naturally be more afraid of going back than for those for whom it's a more abstract concept.
As another example, this is why Arab countries have much higher rates of females in STEM, than more progressive countries. Simply put, the women know that a STEM degree is a ticket to a better life somewhere else, rather than staying in their own country.
[1] The US also has some of the worst outcomes. The distributions are much wider in the US than other countries in many aspects of life -- income, access to healthcare, education, etc.
[2] and yes these two things feed off each other
EDIT: Why downvote when you can engage? It's really quite strange in the modern day when you can have a musing, and instead of supposedly intellectually curious people engaging, you're just downvoted.
I don't know why no one disagreeing with you will engage. Human ingenuity is forged in fire. You don't build muscle without discomfort. You can't have children without sacrifice. I personally don't think the lack of a welfare state is a huge factor in American universities (I tend to think immigration is a much bigger factor), partially because the US has a huge safety net and every year it grows [1].
Philosophically this is a tough one: take away the welfare state and you remove the floor of human suffering. Add the welfare state and you remove the drive to succeed (from most individuals, there will always be some who disregard all contrary incentives).
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-to-announce-student-loan-...
> I don't know why no one disagreeing with you will engage.
It's a common problem on HN; very used to it at this point.
I do agree that immigration plays a part as well, but immigration is also driven by pre-existing differences. The US must have done something that made so many migrants want to study here over other countries, and I think this is because American universities have been good for a very long time.
EDIT: Sorry you're being downvoted too. What a strange world.
Protestant readyness to suffer as a martyr for a imagined supressed cause, same is to be expected from iranian universities and israeli universities.
Subversive society streaks exist. Problems often can not be brute forced economically or within a given reference framework, so its interesting having people who "go around the problem" without gaming the system in total. So you want a punk mentality, but not a wallstreet trader to produce real value.
It doesnt. Bulverism would like to have a word with you.
Because the U.S. have the best war budgets. /j
I would love an accounting of things that the universities have discovered that have trickled down to the public in the past century.
I'm still using essentially the same internal combustion vehicle, phone, and literally everything that I was using decades ago and more or less that my parents were using. My phone is a little better, that's about it.
What is this 150 billion of our tax dollars a year getting us?
A telescopic photograph of chorizo?
Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.
We just take for granted that giving money to science is a good investment. I've worked in university science labs and they're extremely inefficient, incompetent, and low labor. One view is that this money is scientific welfare.
One might wonder where Elon gets his ideas from. Perhaps he's standing on the shoulders of thousands of man-years of research and development paid for by the American people. You may be surprised to learn how much R&D technology that takes telescopic photographs of chorizo ends up in your pocket as your phone, smartwatch, etc. Elon fetishism has no place in this argument. He's an end user of the system. I am not even sure how it can compare.
> One might wonder where Elon gets his ideas from.
Looking at Lithium Ion batteries it looks like the tech was developed at NASA and Exxon.
Whom does he hire to help build those cars, rockets and tunnels? Graduates of universities or Oompa Loompas?
To charitably read and steel-man the GP's comment, one could argue that while undergraduate education is fine - there are better patterns of research - such as industry (bell labs, spaceX, google ml research), or government (oak ridge, NASA center). That the mixed mission between doing research and teaching at the same time in a T1 research university doesn't work as well as more formally separating those functions.
I'm pretty sure I don't agree with the above ^, it probably discounts the value of grad-school research as an apprenticeship model amongst other drawbacks. But it does have some merit to bear consideration. Surely the current model isn't perfect - where could we improve?
"Stanford Solar Car Project was ‘key’ to Tesla’s inception", says Tesla co-founder JB Straubel
https://electrek.co/2016/05/12/tesla-motors-stanford-solar-c...
The irony here is that you’d never be considered for an engineering position at any of his companies without an engineering degree AND a good GPA.
This is one of the most ignorant comments I’ve seen, and I weep for a future where people think that cramming flashlight batteries into cars is as big an achievement as eradicating polio, discovering the structure of dna, developing vaccines that prevent common cancers, creating the whole concept of open source software, or editing genes.
Your comment seems extremely ignorant. Wanting scientists to have accountability with our tax money seems like a valid ask.
> eradicating polio -> almost a century ago 1950s?
> discovering the structure of dna -> almost a century ago 1950s
> developing vaccines that prevent common cancers -> cancer is the second leading cause of death, this hasn't impacted the world significantly and isn't even a treatment except in extremely specific cases.
> creating the whole concept of open source software -> almost half century ago, not even academia, a consortium
> editing genes -> been around 15 years and would love some examples of how it impacted the world significantly pretty much at all
The first serial production of battery-electric cars was in 1906.
The HPV vaccine has already cut the rate of cervical cancers by more than 90% in the age groups that have benefitted from the vaccine. If you think savings the lives of thousands of young women is not an impact, you're just reinforcing my opinion of you.
Over a trillion dollars to save thousands of lives. I don't know if that's an ideal investment.
>Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.
Well certainly most of his engineers he employees were educated, and this is shocking, at Universities.
Where do you think all the fundamental research into Aerodynamics, Materials Science, etc. happened that has made his company even feasible?
> Elon Musk has moved the needle much more than all of the universities combined it seems like.
This is incredibly narrow-sighted. How many of “Elon Musk’s” (really, the people he employs) achievements have been made possible by foundational scientific research funded by public grants and made available to the broader community? I would argue a nontrivial amount. Much of tech entrepreneurship is technology transfer, not foundational. These are all parts of a complex ecosystem and no one piece is solely responsible for moving the needle.
Nothing from any of Musk’s enterprises has been even slightly innovative, scientifically. He is an industrial technologist, which is fine, but it means he scales up known processes.
I would argue the material science done that enabled the raptor and raptor2 rocket engine (the o2 side pre-burner specifically) was pretty innovative scientifically.