Elsevier: Will the American research university make it to its 100th birthday?
Excerpt from Elsevier | By: Robert A Brown | February 14, 2025
Various forces are converging to threaten the viability of our research universities. How can we support their sustainability?
I’m sure the title makes little sense to some readers. We are talking about revered, globally unique public and private universities that have developed over the last 75 years into the most productive and diverse research institutions in the world. Their faculty lead a critical portion of the nation’s research and scholarship, and their students become innovators and leaders of society and the world’s largest economy. How can research universities not flourish in a nation that leans heavily on advances in science and technology and focuses on improving the human condition?
My goal here is to present facts that, when taken together, paint a worrisome picture of the future of our research universities. But first, I will describe where our research universities came from.
The birth of the US research university
I set the birth of US research universities to coincide with the launch of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1950, as recommended in the landmark report by Vannevar Bush, Science — The Endless Frontier opens in new tab/window. The NSF was created to support faculty-led research in recognition of the contributions of science and engineering to winning World War II and as a prescient investment in the future. In effect, May 10, 2025, will be the 75th anniversary of the modern research university.
With the NSF came peer review for judging the merit of research proposals, effectively spreading research and doctoral education among institutions. Even with this distributed funding model, a specific goal was to create a number of globally leading universities. This aim is clear in a 1960 report by President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee opens in new tab/window that stated, “We must hope that where there were only a handful of generally first-rate academic centers a generation ago and may be as many as fifteen or twenty today there will be thirty or forty in another fifteen years.” Implicit in their report is a call for determining who is first-rate; however, no ranking was intended as the free market of quality ideas and peer reviewed grants would suffice.
From this beginning, other agencies joined the NSF funding model, and research thrived with the universities also buoyed by tuition revenue from more students going to college. Student demand flattened in the 1970s, and the need for STEM graduates moderated in a recessionary economy. Simultaneously, the government investment shifted from physical science toward human health, and the National Institutes of Health budget grew threefold in that decade.
American research universities developed from these early years. By the 2021 accounting (a new version is due in 2025), there were 146 Carnegie R1 universities (doctoral universities with very high research intensity) out of the over 2,000 research universities in the country. The academic research enterprise is enormous; the 2022 NSF HERD survey opens in new tab/window reported that universities collectively spent $97 billion on research, of which $54 billion was federal support, which totals less than 20 percent of the government’s investment in the nation’s GERD (gross domestic expenditures on research and development). Not unexpectedly, federal funding skews toward the 20 biggest universities, which receive a third of the support.