> 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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...
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.
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?
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.
But the US seems to have worldclass outliers in just about any field you can think of.
Deleted Comment
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)
Deleted Comment
The things people will do for science!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://datalab.usaspending.gov/colleges-and-universities/
https://www.science.org/content/article/pandemic-pounds-us-u...
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.
You can't have 5 research universities in a country of 5 million people.
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 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.
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...
https://www.shanghairanking.com/rankings/arwu/2022
Deleted Comment
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.
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.