There's all kind of post hoc explanations for why this historically contingent organizational structure is really super optimal and the best of all ways of setting things up, but frankly they aren't very convincing. Probably the least bad is the notion that this structure is the only politically palatable way to subsidize the intellectual output of arts and many of the social science. But even there, I'm not wholly convinced.

*Actually more than two. There's also semi-pro sports teams among other things.

Disagree. The best place for undergrads to get a top-notch education is where they have the opportunity to work with or even around top-notch researchers and people at the top of their fields. Yes, many faculty don't spend that much time with undergrads, but they spend some. And they spend time with grad students who spend time with undergrads. This is the best way we know how to organize great teaching for undergrads.

Isn´t the fact that colleges are places part of the problem to begin with?

In the non-US place where I had my tertiary education, the university was in the major metropolis (it had plenty of green and even a small river crossing it, but it was still in the city). I lived at home with my parents.

In the afternoons, I was able to go and attend "scientific initiation" classes at a nearby research institution that didn't issue undergraduate degrees but still had their researchers do some outreach. This at the cost of not taking an internship, which pretty much everyone else did, of course.

I'm not saying this is any kind of ideal model, but the research-vocational university isn't the singular model for contact with the research life (another alternative: internships in dedicated research institutions).

Of course, by refactoring the university, this... disrobes... the problem of funding research.

As someone who has spent time in both a low ranked university and a top 5 one, I cannot agree.

The curriculum is more demanding in the top 5 one, so if you get through it, you'd be more educated.

The quality of the instruction, though, was poorer.

What really does make a difference, though, is having highly motivated peers. They'll make a bigger difference in driving you to do your best than top faculty members will.

Would love to hear more :)

I'm also in the Pacific Northwest, so it seemed...appropriate.

We are really debating a line drawing exercise. Scholars have to teach Phd students because they are the only ones that know the material that phd students are learning. Even if a particular scholar or scholars in general are bad at pedagogy it doesn't matter, there's no other option. On the hand high school American history can be taught by people that aren't themselves historians. We can select people that are good at and like teaching instead of having no choice but to use the people whose passion is investing the marriage rituals of late 17th century puritan farmers.

My contention is that the vast majority of undergraduate coursework is on the high school American history side of the line. Those arguing on the other side don't generally argue that e.g. intro to partial differential equations -- a sophomore / junior level course for majors -- needs to be taught by someone publishing in the field of mathematics. That only someone on the cutting edge understands it well enough to teach it to others. Rather they make some rather mystical and anecdote driven claims about how such professors are inherently superior at imparting this knowledge than would be professors that were selected for, and spent their time honing, their skills in teaching rather than their skills in publishing.

It's a rather extraordinary claim that selecting for exactly the qualities we are looking for would produce inferior outcomes to selecting for some other tenuously related quality, so it requires a fair bit of evidence.

This is highly field dependent. I'm on the math faculty at a public research university. The bulk of research funding in mathematics comes from the NSF, which generally does not buy out teaching (so most of us have no choice but to teach a full load). Not saying this is a bad thing -- there are aspects of teaching I really enjoy -- but the statement above is not quite accurate for fields like mathematics. Similarly, most of our graduate students are TAs most of the time, except when they have an external fellowship or when their advisor happens to have a grant to support them.

I'm a tenured faculty member at one of the institutions discussed in the article, currently looking elsewhere for jobs. If I don't find an academic one, I'll probably leave and go into non-academic fields.

I have mixed feelings about the article, because I think the takeaway message is about right, and well-meaning, but there's a subtext that's completely problematic and lost, which is this:

The whole discussion in the article is about profit, and the loss of public [midwestern] university profits to other institutions. That is, the problem identified is in retention of profitable faculty: "midwestern universities are losing their most profitable faculty because they can't afford their salaries." Quality of research is equated with profit, grant dollars brought in, and so forth.

Why is this a problem? A number of reasons.

First and foremost, the cost and profit research brings in is not the same as quality. There's a number of studies showing that impact (itself a poor measure of quality, although sufficient) is only weakly related to grant funding. Lots of good research can be done on a minimal, if no budget, and assuming that grant dollars = research quality is wrong. It might be true for certain fields, where equipment costs, etc. are standard, but for other fields, like math, you don't need a huge budget.

The second problem is that by defining research quality in terms of profitability, you're feeding the problems that caused the hollowing out of midwestern public universities to begin with. The problem is not actually decreased public funding of universities, the problem is in the devaluing of research as a public benefit. The defunding is a secondary consequence of the devaluing, not the problem itself. Crippling tenure in Wisconsin, and threatening it in Iowa, are other consequences of this devaluing.

These discussions strike me as sort of stupid at some level, because those grants that are being brought in are federal grants, which means they are public. So what's really happening is that the states are saying "we don't want to support faculty doing research. If they can get money another way, let them."

If you want to fund research, there's basically four ways to do it:

A consumer can support a company or other institution directly, by purchasing goods or donating, or paying tuition, or whatever, which then funds research as part of its operations.

A consumer can support the researcher directly through kickstarter-like mechanisms or directly to the researcher (rare today but happens).

A citizen can provide taxes to the state which funds the researcher's salary, either at the university, or in another institution. This means the state is supporting the research.

A citizen can provide taxes to the federal government, which funds the researcher's salary. This means the federal government is supporting the research.

What's happened today is that the third option is being gutted. What we've done is essentially say that "research isn't valuable unless the researcher gets federal funds to do so, or is paid for by a private corporation."

I'm a very highly cited researcher, by many metrics, but I don't bring in much grant money by the nature of my research. So by the university's metrics I'm not valuable. Maybe that's reasonable, but to me I increasingly feel like something's hollow in these discussions.

I see administrators being quoted in this article and feel resentment, because I don't see them saying "see here, you need to give us money to support this wonderful research." What I see them saying is "see here, you need to give us money to pay the people who are bringing in money from elsewhere." What this does is feed the underlying problematic value assertion, which is that the research means nothing, it's the money. "We need money so we can make more money" is what they're actually saying.

Research isn't something that is easy to measure "profit" in. Rather, research is a lot more like the exploration of the unknown or sparsely known.

Discovery of a new process or physical law of nature could lead to more benefit than even a gold rush. Maybe we figure out how to actually make fusion work at small scale (economically). Maybe a new way of looking at atomic interactions allows for the creation of entirely new classes of devices across many categories; getting us closer to actual science fiction toys.

Without research, we probably won't get there, and it'll sure take a lot longer if we aren't trying.

Research can also be compared to efforts to break 'enemy messages' during a WWII. In some ways success was possible and that made victory much easier to achieve. In other ways it was either harder or didn't pan out; that didn't mean it was impossible, it just meant that it wasn't within reach of the general level of technology that existed at the time. The tools of today make those old techniques prone to even brute forcing, which means that problems that fail conventional searches today MAY be unlocked by future advances in other fields.

You never know if you don't try to look.

This has happened in federal republics: in the past states were more powerful and expected to bear a larger portion of the Public Good-producing apparatus. Then some stuff happens (maybe production is de-localized even if it remains intra-national; maybe states enter races-to-the-bottom in state taxes to attract industries, etc.) and only the federal government is able to deal with problems.

So that's probably orthogonal to research.

The basic problem: research broadly framed is a public good, like a lighthouse. But hey, math research is thoroughly public, theorems are all utterly equivalent to a small number of rules of metamathematics. OTOH drug research can often be access-controlled so it can be made profitable. This is the pure-applied spectrum, and all the innovative solutions are about having private actors pay for stuff at the margins in the applied end. For example: I work with symplectic numerical integrators, maybe Mathworks out of its enlightened self-interest should pay me so that even if the research comes out in papers it will be first on its MATLAB suite of engineering stuff. See?

Researchers are almost always faculty (yes, some places have research scientist type roles on staff).

If you were at my university, which is not so different from Ohio State, you would never meet me - save, perhaps, at the fast food places in the student union. I'm research faculty, and not only do I not teach undergrads, there isn't even an undergraduate program in my area - it's strictly graduate students.

And forgive me for saying this, but most undergraduates I do encounter are amazingly ignorant of the scope of the university, what it is their professors do, etc.

"The university this past year revamped the student living situation on north campus [1][2]. The university is expanding at a feverish pace because students want to come here; we are gaining recognition beyond being simply a football school and aspiring high school students are not considering OSU to be nearly the backup school it once was. Sure, it isn't as flashy to tell your relatives you go to OSU as opposed to MIT or Harvard, but it's not the disappointment most used to consider it to be."

Students are one of the few ways a state university now has to reliably bring in money, and as such, they have to compete for them. You are, in essence, the subject of a marketing campaign.

"This article exposes much that I've been ignorant to as an undergrad, but it feels to blow some issues out of proportion. Sure, we don't nearly have as much funding as private universities, but that's par for the course for a public university which offers cheap tuition for local students, and is generous with its scholarships."

One of the reasons tuition is rising, and the schools that have low tuition are under pressure, is that state and federal funding has dried up, so student tuition and fees are the only lever they have left. Many of these universities, even if they have managed to hold the line so far, are at the breaking point.

"Maybe I'm just a bit too thick to see the apocalypse the author is foretelling."

Universities have benefits beyond "Did we teach undergrads"? It's those benefits that are under strain.

The article feels a bit disingenuous to me because it compares funding for hugely popular private universities to those in flyover country. If the author could provide statistics for private universities in Ohio and Pennsylvania that supported the same trend, then I would see his thesis more clearly.

Very few things in America have been quite as good recently at convincing people without a lot of money to spend a ton of money on shit they don't need as the whole "look at our gym and amazing new dorms and beautiful new buildings" undergrad amenity wars.