How Not to Defend Elite Universities chronicle.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from chronicle.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
Just after the Civil War, two innovators found a successful formula. Johns Hopkins and Cornell made key reforms that started attracting the best research talent and the large sums of money needed to keep it.
Today, reformers would like to tweak practices like tenure that helped create this virtuous circle. But Urquiola says they should keep a few important tradeoffs in mind.
Urquiola recently spoke with the AEA’s Tyler Smith about the history of the US university system and what today s education policymakers can learn from it.
The edited highlights of that conversation are below, and the full interview can be heard using the podcast player below.
How US replaced Europe as Nobel Prize magnet
Premium
General view of the Blue Hall, with the Table of Honour (C), during the 2015 Nobel prize award banquet in Stockholm City Hall.
(FILE PHOTO: REUTERS)
Share Via
Read Full Story
In the early 20th century, Nobel laureates were most likely to have German or French academic history. Today, the US dominates the CVs of scholars who win the coveted prize. What has changed in a hundred years?
A study by W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola of Columbia University describes how several higher education reforms in the US led to increased competition and revolutionized the quality of research.