The university’s contribution to progress in economy and productivity has not been convincing. High education institutions currently hire over 15 million researchers around the world, that is 275 percent growth from 1980 when only 4 million researchers were working at research institutions. Yet, around those years the productivity growth rate of the economy was much much higher than the rates which we are witnessing these days. Even with the new innovation wave of artificial intelligence, the annual productivity growth remains below 1 percent.
Ashish Arora and his colleagues delved deep into it in their new paper. In two to three decades after the second world war, universities’ role in innovation was modest. The scientific research was mostly on the shoulders of corporate labs. Back then, companies like AT&T or General Electric were as scientific as profitable. In the 1960s, the R&D unit of DuPont, a chemical company, published more scientific papers than MIT, Caltech and Journal of American Chemical Society, combined. Ten people who worked at Bell lab (Once apart from AT&T) eventually won the nobel prize!
That was a period when the government’s spending for higher education was low. On the other hand, tough anti-monopoly laws made it impossible for corporations to buy other companies’ innovations and ideas. The only way was to have their own laboratories. However from the 1970s onwards, the competition policies loosened and public funds poured to universities. Therefore many firms thought that they did not need their own research labs. Nowadays, only FinTech and Pharmaceutical corporations have strong labs and R&D units.
According to this paper, the old corporate-lab model was much more fruitful than this university-led one. University-led research and papers look brilliant and sophisticated but they do not meaningfully contribute to corporates’ papents, productivity, number of researchers hired by them etc. Of course according to the paper’s data, life sciences are an exception.
But why is that happening? Free from real demands of the industry, some of these university based researches are only published to enhance the citation and h-index of their authors. Others are satisfying their geek for science curiosities. However, considering low results, funding universities by taxpayer’s money seems more like unjustifiable luxury!
Source: Economist
