Prof. Noll on the Research University

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells | Wednesday, April 22, 1998

Editor's Note: Roger Noll is Professor of Economics and Director of the Public Policy Program at Stanford University. His recently published book, Challenges to Research Universities, collects a series of essays which together posit a startlingly negative view of the economic outlook for the nation's research universities.

The Dartmouth Review: I picked up a copy of your book, Challenges to Research Universities. What prompted you to write it?

Roger Noll: That's always a hard question to answer. I was interested in what the changes in resources and revenues to research universities were likely to do to them in the future, and I was interested in how exactly research universities differ from other kinds of institutions in terms of their performance. So that was basically the motivating factor just to try to get a better grasp of the significance of the changes that have been going on in the 1990s with respect to them.

TDR: What did you find?

Noll: There are lots of things in a book, so let me just say what I think are the most important things. Number one is the sort of dramatic difference in the quality of universities in the United States and to some extent Canada, in comparison with the rest of the world. I think thats important — how the American educational system, despite the problems its had in elementary and secondary education has if anything gotten stronger relative to the rest is the seemingly unexplainable loss of public support in the world in the last twenty years. The second thing I think is relevant to state universities. One cannot find an economic or political explanation for the turning around of state universities, the financial support of state universities that took place in the late 80s and early 90s.

The significant decline in it cannot be explained by things such whats going on in the economy, what is the value of higher education to students and to local communities, what is the composition of state governments. None of the normal things that can explain any government programs seem to work to explain what has happened to state universities. The third part is the empirical evidence with regard to the value of higher education...that it's increased substantially in the last 20 years, measured by earning differentials — education-related earning differentials. I think that's important.

TDR: Here at Dartmouth, our new President just announced he wants to make Dartmouth into a research university, so I'm interested in what sort of effect that will have on undergraduate teaching. In your book you argue that research and teaching are, for professors, complements. It seems a little counterintuitive to me to say that there's not going to be some sort of at least time trade-off or devotion trade-off for professors.

Noll: There is a trade-off, but the point is that universities are generating revenue from other activities. The real question is if someone devotes X% of their time to undergraduate education, and Y% of their time to graduate education and Z% of their time to research - the question is what is the revenue generated compared to those proportions?

And it is possible that a university can be losing money on the undergraduate education side and be profitable on the research side, so that in fact a research university can engage in greater subsidization of undergraduate education so each individual faculty member is producting less undergraduate service but the total number of faculty is more than compensatingly higher so that in fact the total amount of service for undergraduates is greater in research universities. The empirics did not have to come out the way they did. This is purely a theoretical argument.

TDR: If we think not in terms of revenue generated for the university, but in terms of how much time each professor is going to be able to devote to undergraduates and consequently what level the undergraduate education is going to be at, is there not a different conclusion there?

Noll: Not necessarily. You have to do two things. The end result is going to be is what is the knowledge state of a graduating senior? And the knowledge state of a graduating senior in the two cases is going to depend partly on amount of time each faculty member devoted to the student, going to depend partly how many faculty there are, and going to depend partly on how much the faculty had to teach them, how good the faculty member was, how much knowledge the faculty member had to give to the student. And its going to depend in part on the other sort of non-faculty resources like libraries and laboratories and that kind of stuff that are in the university. It is absolutely clear, you have pointed to one of the those four things and it is absolutely right. If one moves from a teaching institution to a research institution the proportion of each individual faculty member's time devoted to undergraduates will go down. But then you have to ask the question is there a compensating change.

TDR: So the drop in devotion to undergraduate teaching might be redeemed by an equivalent increase in research facilities available to undergraduate students?

Noll: Exactly, that would more than offset that. It is the case that a faculty member in a research university contrasted to a teaching university devotes half as much time to teaching. It is also the case that universities that are research universities have far better laboratories, have far better libraries, have far more faculty per students. And it seems to be the case that the students actually learn more. Now that is holding lots of stuff constant, but that seems to be what it is. Now that doesn't mean that there can't be some liberal arts colleges that do a terrific job, it just means that it is a lot harder. It is a lot harder to produce a quality product if you are a single purpose because you don't get advantages of these economies of scope. It is more advantageous to a student to learn physics from someone who is a candidate for a Nobel Prize than from someone who is not.

There appears to be an advantage to that. And that seems to be worth more than the fact that the Nobel Prize winner may be only devoting 15 hours per week to undergraduates where at some other place, somebody may be devoting 30 or 40 hours per week to undergraduates. That is the crucial distinction. At typical universities - the teaching-intensive universities, it is true that individual faculty members devote more hours per week to students than at research universities but they also tend to have fewer faculty...as a result, the total amount of faculty attention across all faculty gotten by undergraduates, may not be any different. Beyond that, particularly sharing of facilities, having facilities that are used on one hand for research and on the other education - these are plausible when you drop back a step. The main differences you can observe between research universities and teaching universities should be towards the end of the undergraduate experience when science majors or engineering majors start getting into advanced classes and working in people's labs.

TDR: There is one other constant, that is more applicable in Dartmouth's case than in a general one. Here, just about all of the students are not concentrating in the sciences but are doing humanities and maybe social science work. Is there therefore going to be something less of a spillover effect?

Noll: The answer to that would be yes, if there were no change. First of all, I think it probably is the case that students are self-selecting. If Dartmouth all of a sudden had a world-class physics department you'd all of a sudden find physics majors. But secondly, even holding that constant then you are right.

What you're going to have is one form of the spillover benefit isn't going to be there, which is the joint product of research and education and facilities. The other part, the cross-subsidy will still be there. That is to say that there is some evidence that universities with big science departments have more English professors per student than universities that don't have big science departments.

In the modern American university setting, what being a research university means is primarily engaging in science and engineering. My guess is that English literature faculty at Dartmouth do as much research as English literature faculty at Harvard. The big difference is going to be in science and engineering. Historically the revenues from science and engineering have been substanitally greater than the cost. And so that excess revenue has been used to increase faculty size and other resources throughout the university, not just in those disciplines.

TDR: So in a research university each professor teaching undergraduates will spend half as much time, on average, with his undergraduates as will a professor at a teaching college?

Noll: Yes.

TDR: And Dartmouth is a teaching college right now?

Noll: Yes.

TDR: What do you think is motivating the decision to turn Dartmouth into a research university?

Noll: What may be motivating Dartmouth now is, looking down the path, liberal arts colleges have had increasingly difficult financial times because tuition has gotten so high relative to what middle class people can afford. They are looking for a way to diversify their portfolio because of what has been happening to the society around them.

A question to ask is if there is any future in being a Dartmouth in 2050, whether the nature of the academic business has changed so dramatically that the traditional, very elite liberal arts colleges, 'little Ivys,' have become less viable financially and economically and so it may not have a choice. Dartmouth's choice may be either to get weaker, and be more like the weaker liberal arts colleges. or to go with the research dimension. I suspect that is the debate trustees and administrators have had at Dartmouth.

Prof. Noll on the Research University

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