From Washington Monthly, a lengthy analysis of Midwest public research universities and how cuts in research funding have left midwestern state schools—and the economies they support—struggling to survive.
Federal funding cuts would hit all public research universities hard. However, by focusing on Midwestern rust belt flagships, it misses some of the demographic changes in the country that have a significant effect. Look at the UCs - Irvine, Davis, et al have more impressive research portfolios than they did in the past. Or southern schools that have made significant strides. Not surprising because the national economy has shifted that way. One can also look at the schools they pick out. As far as I can tell, Ohio State is doing fine. Illinois is struggling, but that is more likely because it is possibly the worst run state in the country. Wisconsin was ranked very high compared to the economic output of the state, so never had a lot of margin for error. And one can find counter examples - as far as I can tell Purdue’s national rep has gone up even as one or two of its neighbors has declined.
The main points being federal funding cuts are a serious problem for state universities, but some flow of top faculty from midwest to south and west makes sense given demographic shifts in the country.
That’s been going on for 100+ years!
btw: it goes both ways. A few years ago, Michigan, a “midwestern university”, lured away one of Dartmouth’s young Gov/Poli Sci guns with all kinds of money and perks: instant lab+grad students and no teaching requirement.
This is a poorly researched and highly misleading, scare-mongering story by someone who clearly doesn’t understand how university budgets operate. What’s alarming is that the author is a “higher education editor” at a “news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University,” which is a pretty damning indictment of the standards of intellectual discourse at Teachers College, Columbia University.
For starters, the author points to recent faculty losses at the Universities of Wisconsin-Madison and Illinois as representative of broader trends in the region. While it’s true that Wisconsin-Madison and Illinois have been hemorrhaging faculty talent, there are state-specific reasons for this. The state of Wisconsin is shooting itself in the foot with Gov. Scott Walker’s sustained attacks on higher education budgets, university self-governance, and tenure. The governor makes no secret of his intention to break the power and prestige of the University of Wisconsin, and he is succeeding. In Illinois the problem isn’t a targeted attack, but rather a completely dysfunctional state budgeting process and a pension system in crisis and on the brink of collapse. Under the circumstances it’s easy to see why the pastures might look greener elsewhere for those faculty who have opportunities to leave—typically those with the greatest star-power in their respective fields.
But that’s not reflective of region-wide trends. There’s always some churn, especially when the economy is strong, markets are thriving, and private university endowments are bulging, but this is nothing new. Public university salaries have been lower than private university salaries for a long time, especially at more senior (full professor) levels–and not just in the Midwest. But that hasn’t stopped the better Midwestern public universities from recruiting and nurturing some of the top entry-level talent to the point where, once established, some become attractive targets for lateral offers from wealthier private schools. As one Dean told me, “I don’t mind if the top private schools try to poach my faculty, even if we end up losing some of them. That just tells me I have great faculty, and we’re doing our job in identifying and recruiting the top entry-level talent and helping them get established in their careers. As long as we can continue to recruit great people to replace the great people we lose, we’ll be just fine.” And of course, some don’t leave. The cost of living is much lower in the Midwest than on the coasts (making some of the salary differential illusory), and the overall quality-of-life in major Midwestern college towns like Ann Arbor or Madison is rated by many people among the best in the country. Those towns also usually have excellent K-12 public education. It’s not always so easy to uproot a two-careers family with kids thriving in great schools.
As for the claim that salaries are lower at major Midwestern public research universities than those in other parts of the country, it’s pure bunk. Salaries are higher in the Midwest than in the South and the West apart from California. Salaries are slightly higher in the Northeast but once you account for cost-of-living they’re at least comparable, if not higher in the Midwest. It’s really only the University of California system that’s an outlier on the high side, but again, the high cost of living in California makes much of that difference illusory.
Here are some representative average full professor salaries, from the AAUP 2016-17 faculty compensation survey:
Midwest
Michigan 168.2 K
Ohio State 149.5
Illinois 147.7
Purdue 145.5
Minnesota 142
Indiana 140
Iowa 138.3
Wisconsin 132.7
South
UNC Chapel Hill 155.2 K
Alabama 144.5
Tennessee 140.2
Clemson 133.8
Georgia 126.4
Auburn 123
LSU 118.3
Mississippi 118.3
Northeast
Rutgers 163.5 K
Maryland 160.1
Penn State 154.3
UConn 154.2
Stony Brook 152.4
UMass Amherst 150.3
West
UCLA 195 K
UC Berkeley 185.1
UCSB 169.6
UC Irvine 165.7
UC Davis 160.1
Arizona State 143.7
Colorado-Boulder 139.6
Washington 138
Utah 131.7
Arizona 129.4
Oregon 128.9
Yup to all of the above.
One more shot: the author conflates state support for higher education with federal research funding. Both are important to public research universities, but in very different ways. States spend very little on university research; they generally fund a portion of the education side (often only at the undergraduate level), and in many states major capital improvements–though that’s not uniform as some public universities, like the University of Michigan, pay for capital improvements out of their own budgets, without state funding earmarked for that purpose.
Federal research funding is almost entirely in science, medicine, and engineering, with biomedical research getting the lion’s share. This makes the figures not completely comparable across universities. Those without medical schools (e.g., UC Berkeley, Purdue, MIT) will end up lower in the rankings even though they’re research behemoths in other sciences and engineering. Similarly for those without engineering programs (e.g., UNC Chapel Hill). But that aside, federal research budget cuts would slam all research universities, public and private. If Midwest public research universities are especially vulnerable on this score, it’s only because they’ve been among the most successful in competing for federal research dollars, making federal research spending a larger fractional share of their overall budgets. If the federal funding dries up, it’s not as if faculty will be fleeing Midwestern public for either public or private universities in other parts of the country, because they’ll all be reeling, too. The publics don’t have any slack in their budgets to absorb that kind of blow, much less to add faculty. And even the best-endowed privates aren’t sitting on piles of spare cash. Yes, they have huge endowments, but the endowment isn’t just a giant rainy-day slush fund.
They’re already spending endowment funds at a predictable, sustainable rate, generally around 5% of a 3-year average of endowment assets. Spend any more than that and they’ll be “eating the seed corn,” crippling their future budgets. So yes, the threat of federal research spending cuts is ominous, but it’s ominous to all research universities. And it has little to do with state budget cuts.
State budget cuts could limit the number of faculty hired and employed and/or put downward pressure on faculty salaries, and in those ways indirectly affect a school’s research capacity. But some, like the University of Michigan which already gets just a tiny fraction of its overall budget from the state, have worked around this by building their own giant endowments (in Michigan’s case now around $10 billion), generating funds internally through their own intellectual property rights (patents), and shifting their student body to include more high-tuition OOS students to replace lost legislative appropriations. Deep federal research spending cuts would be devastating for Michigan which ranks #2 among all U.S. research universities in total research spending—but no more so than #1 Johns Hopkins, #4 University of Washington, #5 UC San Diego, or #7 Duke, which are all equally dependent on those same federal research dollars, and all of which generate less research support internally and have smaller endowments than Michigan.
To be fair to the original article, it did not that Michigan’s endowment might put it in a different category But that is one of the few good things in that article.
I do think the fraction of research “jump started” by endowment money has increased, and there has been a modest shift advantaging large endowment universities. And even if all research universities would be hit hard by federal funding cuts, those with large endowments would survive better. But as noted in posts above, wealthy privates raiding other schools has been going on forever, the article cherry picks two fairly unique cases (IL and WI), and leaves out the fact that if schools are getting raided, they must have people worth raiding.
Regarding the raiding of faculty, that has not only been going on for a long time from public research Us…it has also been going on with LACs as well. A few Profs I’ve had were constantly bombarded with offers from elite private universities…including Ivies and Oxbridge.
The ones I’ve had refused to budge. One of my classmates’ Profs finished his long academic career at an Ivy after receiving an offer he obviously felt he couldn’t refuse.
@bclintock-
That is not his claim. Here is the AAUP survey you discussed.
https://futureu.education/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/AAUP-STATUS-OF-PROFESSIONFCS_2016-17_nc-1.pdf
Page five of the survey states:
Furthermore, the article states:
Page 18 of the survey shows that Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin are part of “East North Central” region, with an average salary for full professors of $95,774. If you compare that figure to the average salaries of the other regions, you will find that the average salaries of both the “East North Central” and West North Central" regions are well below the “New England”, “Middle Atlantic”, “West South Central”, “South Atlantic”, “Mountain” and “Pacific” areas. The only region that has lower salaries than the Midwest is the “East South Central” which is Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi and Tennessee. You can call it “bunk”, but the author of the article has this data correct regarding salaries of full professors. The data covers all institutions, not just public flagships.
The two faculty leaving UW are in the twilight of their careers after spending over 25 highly productive years at UW. While it hurts to lose “stars” schools like UW have been making stars for generations. I doubt either will be doing much active teaching work at MIT (where both went). It’s tougher to lose the real up and coming 5-10 year people.
UW was able to replace the Chem loss with a much younger tenured prof from Rochester–not a shabby science school.
http://chem.chem.rochester.edu/~djwgrp/
UW is also commencing construction of a $110 Million addition to the chemistry complex https://www.chem.wisc.edu/content/chemistry-building-project
@Zinhead,
The figures you cite are completely irrelevant. “Average full professor salaries” in a given state or region bear little or no relation to what’'s happening at “public research universities” which is the central thrust of the article, titled “the decline of the public research university.”. The Midwest is chock full of small second-, third- and fourth-tier private colleges where full professor salaries are quite low. There are also numerous second-, third-, and fourth-tier public universities that are not “public research universities” in any meaningful sense, and are not categorized as such by any knowledgeable person or institution that does such categorizations. So if the average full professor at Alma College in Alma, Michigan makes $81,100, and the average full professor at Northern Michigan University makes $88,700, that pulls down the average for the state of Michigan and the East North Central region. But what’s that got to do with the “decline” of the state’s premier public research university where average full professor salaries,are roughly double those at Alma and Northern Michigan, and in fact are among the highest in the country for public research universities?
For the author to cite the figures you’re citing as support for the proposition that major public research universities in the Midwest are in peril is either intellectual dishonesty or incompetence.
Certainly it’s better to have a large endowment than not. But it’s actually public research universities like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois that are leading the way in generating research dollars internally. At each of those schools, “institutional funds” represent roughly a quarter of all research spending. At the best-endowed private research universities, institutional funds typically represent more like 10% to 15% of all research spending—or even less… If federal support for university research gets cut, those fancy privates would be hard pressed to maintain anywhere near their present level of research effort. Would they survive? Of course. But so would the public flagships. In both cases, however, it would be in much diminished form. So the article might have been more aptly titled “the looming decline of the research university” if the author had done his homework.
All research universities are under pressure because research funding at the federal level has been decreased over time. The proposed cut for 2018 federal budget is, again, large.
Overall, private research universities are in a stronger position to deal with the issue because they are more able to obtain donation/endowment to address the deficiency in public research funding. Among public research universities, it depends on administrators’ ability to generate donation and endowment. There are some doing well. There are some seem incapable. I think in the future the deans of engineering schools and the head of science division will more and more functioning like the so-called external deans. That is, their main tasks and thus the basis for their performance evaluation will be more relating to their abilities to bring money back to their units and to provide vision. The day-to-day internal affairs will be largely managed by an associate dean. This external-dean model has long been adopted by business schools and increasingly by medical schools. Note that business schools have basically zero federal/public research funding, and some of their research positions are created via gift-giving endowment chairs and professorships.
Of deans, @prof2dad wrote: “…their main tasks and thus the basis for their performance evaluation will be more relating to their abilities to bring money back to their units and to provide vision. The day-to-day internal affairs will be largely managed by an associate dean.”
Heck, I am already seeing that at the lowly state directional where I teach. The deans are more and more focusing on the big-picture items of revenue, like student recruitment and retention as well as donor relations, while the mundane day-to-day is handled by associate or assistant deans…
The 2017 freshman class is anticipated to be the largest in UW–Madison history at about 6,600 students. :))