Is this really so difficult for you. BobWallace? Every public and private research university I have ever been associated with has said it has a threefold mission: education, scholarship/research, and service. Obviously the three are related at multiple points and in interesting and sometimes complicated ways, but the educational mission and the research mission are also distinct in important respects. When I say that the educational mandate of public research universities is to educate large numbers of their own state’s residents, I say this to distinguish them from private research universities, whose educational mandate is generally to educate much smaller numbers of students, without regard to state residency. So not surprisingly, the publics tend to be much bigger and the privates much smaller, with some overlap in the middle. You seem to want to denigrate the public universities for their size, but if they didn’t have the size that they have, they would be failing at one of the core tasks for which they were created. Sneer all you want, but they have a job to do on the educational front, and in my judgment it’s a da*ned good thing they do what they do, because we’d be much worse off as a society without it.
The research and scholarship mandate is another matter. Some public universities take that mandate seriously and do very well at it. Others take it seriously but don’t do so well. Still others seem not to take it so seriously, or are just clueless about how to proceed. The scale and quality of their research effort is not simply a function of their size as measured by their student body, as some of the biggest simply don’t seem to produce much in this area. The same is also true of private “research universities”—some are research powerhouses, some aren’t.
And where did I ever say the ability of public universities to drum up research dollars justified “claims of superiority to Princeton”? I didn’t say anything remotely resembling that, and in point of fact, I don’t believe that. You may be confusing me with some other posters, but I never made any such claim. Again, you really ought to read more carefully. I merely posted some numbers because I was curious about whether another poster’s factual claims were correct. The numbers I dug up substantially corroborated those claims. That did not commit me to the normative claims that poster was making.
In point of fact, I think figures on research expenditures can be highly misleading. As I have stated repeatedly (but apparently falling on your deaf ears), research expenditures tell you nothing about the quality or value to society of the research being produced. One hopes that over time, research expenditures that produce nothing of value don’t get funded indefinitely, but who knows? And we also need to give scientific inquiry a large benefit of the doubt, because advances in scientific knowledge don’t always produce short-term tangible practical applications–but over the long term, we’re better off knowing than not knowing. So there’s a lot of gray area there.
I also think measuring scholarship by research grants received can be downright pernicious. I happen to work in a field where very little external grant money is available, because frankly most of the research and scholarship people in my field produce doesn’t require a lot of money. That doesn’t mean their scholarship isn’t valuable, and it certainly doesn’t mean there’s no difference in the quality and value of the scholarship produced by the faculties at various schools. It’s just that trying to measure it by research grants received is a particularly dumb way to proceed. This is true of most non-STEM fields.
So to summarize, research expenditures at best can tell us something about the scale of a particular institution’s STEM research effort. They tell us almost nothing about the quality of that research. They tell us nothing at all about the quality of the institution’s non-STEM scholarship. And they tell us next to nothing about the quality of the educational product the institution delivers, especially at the undergraduate level, but even at the graduate level and even in STEM fields. (That’s why I think trying to recast research expenditures as a per-student metric is particularly silly and pointless). That said, I happen to find the level of effort in STEM fields reflected in B1G schools’ research expenditures downright impressive—but in my book ,that doesn’t make them “superior” to other institutions, and I think it’s only tangentially related to their educational mission, certainly at the undergraduate level, but even at the graduate level.
But feel free to go ahead and continue to mischaracterize, caricature, mock, and denigrate my views. Hey, it’s a free country.