STAYING NUMBER: How can U.S. research universities remain the world's best?

摘要

AS THE NATION STRUGGLES TO RECOVER from the 2008 economic collapse and subsequent recession, at least one sector - dubbed "America's best industry" by journalist Fareed Zakaria - retains world dominance. It is higher education, especially research-based graduate education, which has undergirded the innovation crucial to America's prosperity. Even before the financial crash and recession, however, knowledgeable observers worried that American pre-eminence faced serious challenges, especially from Asian contenders such as China, India, Hong Kong, and Singapore, which are working aggressively to build world-class universities of their own. Multiple forces appear to threaten America's great research institutions, and the economic crisis, which caused sharp drops in endowment and state support, only exacerbated them. In April 2009, these concerns were crystallized in an address by Tennessee Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former president of the University of Tennessee who served as secretary of education under George H.W. Bush. Speaking to the Association of American Universities, which represents the top-tier research universities in the United States and Canada, he compared today's academic scene to America's loss of its once unchallenged dominance of the automobile industry. "Nothing is more vulnerable than entrenched success," Alexander said, quoting George Romney, president of American Motors, America's no. 4 automaker in Detroit's glory days. The so-called Big Three - General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler - "didn't just make the best cars in the world, they made almost all the best cars," Alexander went on. But they failed to keep pace as Japan met customer demand for smaller, fuel-efficient cars. The rest is the sad story of the decline of America's auto industry.