Research Universities
An Overview
n a great many ways the higher education system of the United States is the most remarkable in the world. The speed with which it developed, its record of achievement, the extent of its reach, the range of its offerings are without parallel. And, particularly in the years since World War II, the system has reached a higher proportion of the national population than that of any other country. Half of the high school graduates in the United States now gain some experience in colleges and universities; we are, as a country, attempting to create an educated population on a scale never known before. The goal of President Harry Truman’s 1947 Commission on Higher Education, that the system must provide “the means by which every citizen, youth, and adult, is enabled and encouraged to carry his education, formal and informal, as far as his native capacities permit” is accepted as axiomatic.In the higher education system in the United States, the research universities have played a leading role: the country’s 125 research universities make up only 3 per cent of the total number of institutions of higher learning, yet they confer 32 per cent of the baccalaureate degrees, and 56 per cent of the baccalaureates earned by recent recipients of science and engineering doctorates (1991-95). Their graduates fill the legislatures and board rooms of the country, write the books we read, treat our ailments, litigate our issues, develop our new technologies, and provide our entertainment. To an overwhelming degree, they have furnished the cultural, intellectual, economic, and political leadership of the nation.
Undergraduates Too Often Shortchanged in the Past
Nevertheless, the research universities have too often failed, and continue to fail, their undergraduate populations. Tuition income from undergraduates is one of the major sources of university income, helping to support research programs and graduate education, but the students paying the tuition get, in all too many cases, less than their money’s worth. An undergraduate at an American research university can receive an education as good or better than anything available anywhere in the world, but that is not the normative experience. Again and again, universities are guilty of an advertising practice they would condemn in the commercial world. Recruitment materials display proudly the world-famous professors, the splendid facilities and the ground-breaking research that goes on within them, but thousands of students graduate without ever seeing the world-famous professors or tasting genuine research. Some of their instructors are likely to be badly trained or even untrained teaching assistants who are groping their way toward a teaching technique; some others may be tenured drones who deliver set lectures from yellowed notes, making no effort to engage the bored minds of the students in front of them.
Many students graduate having accumulated whatever number of courses is required, but still lacking a coherent body of knowledge or any inkling as to how one sort of information might relate to others. And all too often they graduate without knowing how to think logically, write clearly, or speak coherently. The university has given them too little that will be of real value beyond a credential that will help them get their first jobs. And with larger and larger numbers of their peers holding the same paper in their hands, even that credential has lost much of its potency.
These are not problems that have been totally denied or ignored; there is probably no research university in the country that has not appointed faculty committees and created study groups or hired consultants to address the needs of its undergraduates. There have been results: new courses, new majors, revised curricula. A new study by the Center for Instructional Development at Syracuse University suggests that universities believe they are now giving more attention to teaching. At a sample of eleven research universities, deans, department heads, and other administrators said more emphasis was being given to teaching than five years ago.
Radical Reconstruction
Even so, for the most part fundamental change has been shunned; universities have opted for cosmetic surgery, taking a nip here and a tuck there, when radical reconstruction is called for. Serious responses to complaints about undergraduate teaching have generated original and creative pedagogical and curricular experiments. But too often bold and promising efforts have vanished after external grant support disappeared, have withered on the fringes of the curriculum, or have been so compromised that their originality has been lost. Strikingly, the Syracuse study reported that research productivity was still given “much more” weight in making decisions about promotion and tenure of faculty members than was teaching effectiveness.
The way the research university developed made the present-day situation predictable if not inevitable. The inspiration was the German universities of the nineteenth century, which had redefined themselves as institutions dedicated to advanced research on scientific principles. America’s leading colleges adopted parallel goals and began giving advanced degrees, finding honor, excitement, and reward in the exploration of intellectual frontiers made by their faculties. In a country and an era fascinated with discovery and expansion, the research mission has overshadowed the earlier collegiate function of training young men to be ministers, lawyers, and gentlemen. The older function had to be maintained, but the undergraduate experience given the young men, and later the young women as well, was kept isolated from the research activity and still cast in the pre-university mold. Universities on the whole did not see ways to integrate their undergraduates into the research missions that they valued above all else. As Ernest Boyer said in his Scholarship Reconsidered in 1990, “the focus had moved from the student to the professoriate, from general to specialized education, from loyalty to the campus to loyalty to the profession.” Advanced research and undergraduate teaching have existed on two quite different planes, the first a source of pleasure, recognition, and reward, and the latter a burden shouldered more or less reluctantly to maintain the viability of the institution.
Defining Worth
The primacy of research within the espoused missions of American universities is attested over and over within the academic world. The standing of a university is measured by the research productivity of its faculty; the place of a department within the university is determined by whether its members garner more or fewer research dollars and publish more or less noteworthy research than other departments; the stature of the individual within the department is judged by the quantity and quality of the scholarship produced. Every research university can point with pride to the able teachers within its ranks, but it is in research grants, books, articles, papers, and citations that every university defines its true worth. When students are considered, it is the graduate students that really matter; they are essential as research assistants on faculty projects, and their placement as post-doctoral fellows and new faculty reinforces the standing of the faculty that trained them. Universities take great pleasure in proclaiming how many of their undergraduates win Rhodes or other prestigious scholarships and how many are accepted at the most selective graduate schools, but while those achievements are lauded, too many students are left alone to pursue them. And the baccalaureate students who are not in the running for any kind of distinction may get little or no attention.
Why, then, should baccalaureate students give their loyalty and their money to research universities? Because the potential remains for acquiring a virtually matchless education. The research universities possess unparalleled wealth in intellectual power and resources; their challenge is to make their baccalaureate students sharers of the wealth. To realize their potential means a complete transformation in the nature of the education offered.
A New Model
What is needed now is a new model of undergraduate
education at research universities that makes the baccalaureate experience an inseparable part of an integrated whole. Universities need to take advantage of the immense resources of their graduate and research programs to strengthen the quality of undergraduate education, rather than striving to replicate the special environment of the liberal arts colleges. There needs to be a symbiotic relationship between all the participants in university learning that will provide a new kind of undergraduate experience available only at research institutions. Moreover, productive research faculties might find new stimulation and new creativity in contact with bright, imaginative, and eager baccalaureate students, and graduate students would benefit from integrating their research and teaching experiences. Research universities are distinctly different from small colleges, and they need to offer an experience that is a clear alternative to the college experience.
It is obvious that not every student should, or would wish to, attend a research university. Without attempting to characterize students at other kinds of institutions, it might be said that the undergraduate who flourishes at a research university is the individual who enjoys diverse experiences, is not dismayed by complexity or size, has a degree of independence and self-reliance, and seeks stimulation more than security. A research university is in many important ways a city; it offers almost unlimited opportunities and attractions in terms of associations, activities, and enterprises. But as in a city, the requirements of daily living may be taxing, and sorting out the opportunities and finding like-minded individuals may be difficult. The rewards of the ultimate experience, however, can be immeasurable.
University-level education rates in the United States and abroad
This table indicates the percentage of the population of selected nations that enters college or university; it does not have graduation rates.
Net entry to post-secondary
university/college education, for people ages 15 and over:
United States .......... 52%
Canada ................... 49%
United Kingdom ....... 43%
New Zealand ........... 40%
Netherlands ............ 34%
France ................... 33%
Denmark ................ 31%
Germany ................ 27%
Ireland .................... 27%
Austria ................... 26%
Norway .................. 25%
Hungary ................. 20%
Turkey ................... 16%
Switzerland ............ 15%
Average .................. 30%
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Database, Table C4.2, Net Entry rates for university-level education (1995).
THE FACTS
Percentage of recent science and engineering doctoral recipients who earned their bachelor’s degrees at U.S. research
universities, by field of doctorate.
Source: National Science Foundation SRS Survey of Earned Doctorates for the years 1991-95.
THE FACTS
Earned degrees by level and sex, 1965-66 to 2005-06
Note: 1995-1996, 1999-2000, and 2005-2006 data is projected.
Source: U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Earned Degrees Conferred: Projections of Education Statistics to 2006; and integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). "Completions" surveys. This information was prepared February 1996.
THE FACTS
Where students go for higher education
Excluding Two-Year Colleges
Includes Masters and P.h.D. Excludes First Professional due to bad data. Excludes certificates.
Source: 1994 IPEDS