The Economics Of American Universities

This book discusses the adjustment of universities to the changing financial environment. Its authors analyze the relationship between higher education inputs and outputs, assess the available information about the determinants of university costs, survey the influence of market conditions and pricing strategies on students' demands for attendance at institutions of higher education, summarize research on the objectives for institutions of higher education held by different participants and funders, analyze how universities determine their priorities and relative funding for different activities and disciplines, and explore the economics of universities' research functions. In addition, the book addresses three questions regarding the external fiscal environment facing American universities. What are the recent and emerging changes in the key economic variables affecting these institutions? What mechanisms have universities used in the past to cope with tighter financial constraints? What are the implications for university research activities as these institutions adjust to their fiscal constraints?

Postsecondary educational institutions in the United States are facing increasing financial stress and waning public support. Unless these trends can be changed, higher education can be expected to stagnate. What, if anything, can be done? As a starting point, advocates of higher education need to more fully recognize the issues associated with the economic mission of higher education and how this mission gets translated into individual student gains, regional growth, and social equity. This requires an understanding of the relationship between the outcomes of higher education and measures of economic productivity and well-being. This volume addresses topics related to the role of postsecondary education in microeconomic development within the United States. At tention is given to the importance of colleges and universities 'in the enhancement of individual students and in the advancement of the com munities and states within which they work. Although several of the chapters in this volume are aimed at research/teaching universities, much of what is presented throughout can be generalized to all of postsecondary education. Little attention, however, is given to the role of higher education in the macroeconomic development of the United States; this topic is covered in our related book, American Higher Education and National Growth.

A colorful history of US research universities, and a market-based theory of their global success. American education has its share of problems, but it excels in at least one area: university-based research. That’s why American universities have produced more Nobel Prize winners than those of the next twenty-nine countries combined. Economist Miguel Urquiola argues that the principal source of this triumph is a free-market approach to higher education. Until the late nineteenth century, research at American universities was largely an afterthought, suffering for the same reason that it now prospers: the free market permits institutional self-rule. Most universities exploited that flexibility to provide what well-heeled families and church benefactors wanted. They taught denominationally appropriate materials and produced the next generation of regional elites, no matter the students’—or their instructors’—competence. These schools were nothing like the German universities that led the world in research and advanced training. The American system only began to shift when certain universities, free to change their business model, realized there was demand in the industrial economy for students who were taught by experts and sorted by talent rather than breeding. Cornell and Johns Hopkins led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and a few dozen others that remain centers of research. By the 1920s the United States was well on its way to producing the best university research. Free markets are not the solution for all educational problems. Urquiola explains why they are less successful at the primary and secondary level, areas in which the United States often lags. But the entrepreneurial spirit has certainly been the key to American leadership in the research sector that is so crucial to economic success.

In higher education, the United States is the preeminent global leader, dominating the list of the world’s top research universities. But there are signs that America’s position of global leadership will face challenges in the future, as it has in other realms of international competition. American Universities in a Global Market addresses the variety of issues crucial to understanding this preeminence and this challenge. The book examines the various factors that contributed to America’s success in higher education, including openness to people and ideas, generous governmental support, and a tradition of decentralized friendly competition. It also explores the advantages of holding a dominant position in this marketplace and examines the current state of American higher education in a comparative context, placing particular emphasis on how market forces affect universities. By discussing the differences in quality among students and institutions around the world, this volume sheds light on the singular aspects of American higher education.

The US higher education system is on the verge of a revolution, so some observers claim. Archibald and Feldman, leading analysts, provide an incisive overview of the challenges facing and possibilities for America's universities and colleges in their training future generations. And they demonstrate that our higher education system is resilient and adaptable enough to weather the internal, external, and technological threats without changing campuses beyond recognition. The Road Ahead for America's Colleges and Universities examines the threats posed to the current health of higher education by rising tuition and falling government support, as well as from new digital technologies rippling through the entire economy. Some predict disaster, pointing to high costs, exploding debt, and a digital tsunami that supposedly will combine to disrupt and sweep away many of the nation's higher education institutions, or change them beyond recognition. Archibald and Feldman provide a more nuanced view. They argue that the bundle of services that four-year colleges and universities provide will retain its value for the traditional age range of college students. Less certain, Archibald and Feldman argue, is whether the system will continue to be a force for social and economic opportunity. The threats are most dire at schools that disproportionately serve America's most underprivileged students. At the same time, growing income inequality reduces the ability of many students and their families to pay for higher education. Archibald and Feldman suggest a range of policy options at the state and federal level that will help America's higher education system continue to fulfill its promise.

A bibliography of approximately 150 materials authored, coauthored, or edited by Howard R. Bowen from 1935 through 1982 on the economics of American higher education is presented. Specific topics include the following: the wide disparity among colleges in educational cost per student; costs colleges spend per student; adult learning, higher education, and the economics of unused capacity; future social needs and demands for highly educated people; goals, outcomes, and academic evaluation; socially imposed costs of higher education; what college does for the family; the compensation of faculty and staff in American higher education; accountability in higher education; career preparation in the independent liberal arts college; measurements of efficiency; higher education and human equality; outcome data and educational decision making; systems theory, excellence, and values--will they mix; toward social economy; the future of private colleges; efficiency in liberal education; faculty guide to academic economics; research and public policy for higher education; academic freedom and the financing of higher education; the changing power structure in American higher education; federal policy alternatives toward graduate education; inflation and the colleges; marketable skills for youth; philanthropy and academic freedom; financing the external degree; student unrest in the United States; role of the college; the uses of liberal education; graduate education in economics; the study of economics in schools of business; and rising tuition. (SW)

"Academic science in the U.S. once self-consciously avoided the market. But today it is seen as an economic engine that keeps the nation globally competitive. Creating the Market University compares the origins of biotech entrepreneurship, university patenting, and university-industry research centers to show how government decisions shaped by a new argument--that innovation drives the economy-transformed academic science"-- Provided by publisher.

Brendan O’Flaherty brings the tools of economic analysis—incentives, equilibrium, optimization—to bear on racial issues. From health care, housing, and education, to employment, wealth, and crime, he shows how racial differences powerfully determine American lives, and how progress in one area is often constrained by diminishing returns in another.

Latin American neo-structuralism is a cutting-edge, regionally focused economic theory with broad implications for macroeconomics and development economics. Roberto Frenkel has spent five decades developing the theory's core arguments and expanding their application throughout the discipline, revolutionizing our understanding of high inflation and hyperinflation, disinflation programs, and the behavior of foreign exchange markets as well as financial and currency crises in emerging economies. The essays in this collection assess Latin American neo-structuralism's theoretical contributions and viability as the world's economies evolve. The authors discuss Frenkel's work in relation to pricing decisions, inflation and stabilization policy, development and income distribution in Latin America, and macroeconomic policy for economic growth. An entire section focuses on finance and crisis, and the volume concludes with a neo-structuralist analysis of general aspects of economic development. For those seeking a comprehensive introduction to contemporary Latin American economic thought, this collection not only explicates the intricate work of one of its greatest practitioners but also demonstrates its impact on the growth of economics.

Orthodox economics operates within a hypothesized world of perfect competition in which perfect consumers and firms act to bring about supposedly optimal outcomes. The discrepancies between this model and the reality it claims to address are then attributed to particular imperfections in reality itself. Most heterodox economists seize on this fact and insist that the world is characterized by imperfect competition. But this only ties them to the notion of perfect competition, which remains as their point of departure and base of comparison. There is no imperfection without perfection. In Capitalism, Anwar Shaikh takes a different approach. He demonstrates that most of the central propositions of economic analysis can be derived without any reference to standard devices such as hyperrationality, optimization, perfect competition, perfect information, representative agents, or so-called rational expectations. This perspective allows him to look afresh at virtually all the elements of economic analysis: the laws of demand and supply, the determination of wage and profit rates, technological change, relative prices, interest rates, bond and equity prices, exchange rates, terms and balance of trade, growth, unemployment, inflation, and long booms culminating in recurrent general crises. In every case, Shaikh's innovative theory is applied to modern empirical patterns and contrasted with neoclassical, Keynesian, and Post-Keynesian approaches to the same issues. Shaikh's object of analysis is the economics of capitalism, and he explores the subject in this expansive light. This is how the classical economists, as well as Keynes and Kalecki, approached the issue. Anyone interested in capitalism and economics in general can gain a wealth of knowledge from this ground-breaking text.