<p>The projects of the government? I can’t think of ANY civilized country that has such a university that is also the best in the nation. </p>
<p>By the way, I don’t think Australian National University is particularly good, compared to other Australian universities. The UK, France, Germany, etc. don’t have “a national university”. Anyone who wants to copy Singapore is weird.</p>
<p>If you have decided on some criteria to call Oxford or Cambridge “national universities”, then sure the US already has Harvard.</p>
<p>University of Belgium, University of Canada, University of South Africa (yes! - a distance learning school), University of Russia…</p>
<p>I’ll start. IIT (they were nationally chartered, and are situated in multiple campuses throughout the nation). Top notch. Or is India not “civilized”?</p>
<p>That is not a valid answer. For example health research is also not a national function, but the NIH is still the 1000 lb gorilla in medical research.</p>
<p>FTR, I am not in favor of a National University, but mainly because I don’t think we need one. </p>
<p>Now if the major private universities were to collapse for some reason, e.g. because of bad investment of their endowments, we might want to reconsider…</p>
<p>I am pro national university, not because we need one. It serves a purpose, and that is representing the pinnacle of the nation, free of cost. No private university can truly say that they are purely meritorious. However, this national university would be able to do so.</p>
<p>If a country like UK can produce Oxford, we can produce a true giant.</p>
<p>I agree with vicariousparent. Creating a national university would be utterly superfluous given the abundance of WORLD CLASS universities already in the US. </p>
<p>Here are some of the top 20 universities in the world according to the Times Higher Education (I mistrust it because of its pro-British bias and its weird ranking of US universities but that’s another issue). Even if we disagree–as I do–, with its rankings, at least it gives us something to discuss.<br>
Harvard.
Yale.
Caltech
Chicago
MIT
Columbia
Penn
Princeton
Duke
Johns Hopkins
Cornell
Stanford
Michigan</p>
<p>So, according to these rankings, the US has 13 out of the top 20 universities IN THE WHOLE WORLD. Why should the US create yet one more out of whole cloth?</p>
<p>As for Oxford, it lags behind quite a few US universities in quite a few fields with which I am familiar. It also lags behind Cambridge in some fields. In other words, few universities are excellent across the board.</p>
<p>What would the purpose of a national university in the US be? France has ENA for training the administrative elite. But why would the US want to emulate it? We have top universities that train engineers; we don’t need a US-style ITT. We have some top liberal arts and sciences universities that are every bit as good and sometimes better than Oxford or Cambridge. We don’t need to re-invent the wheel.</p>
<p>As I see it, the federal government does not heavily regulate higher education in this country. All institutions must comply with local, state, and federal laws. However, there is no national curriculum at any level of education. Licensing requirements for professional practice of law, medicine, architecture, etc. do influence educational practice, but these requirements generally are set by the states not by the federal government.</p>
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<p>We could decide to make higher education available to all qualified students free of cost to them, without establishing a new national university. These are separate issues.</p>
<p>If you define a national university as one supported in large part by a central government we indeed have many national universities. Most state research institutions, which are usually the state’s flagship(s) school, exist in their current forms only because of the huge amount of money the Federal government pours into them. If they had to rely on the pittances they received from their states they would only be equivalent to liberal arts colleges.</p>
<p>I should also add that money in effect does dictate both national research and teaching agendas of the Federal government as defined by Congress.</p>
<p>Let’s go back to what “national” university RML was actually talking about (unfortunately, RML himself assumed national universities in other countries are like the one he’s envisioning). I have explained that before and again, I am with sorghum on this one.</p>
<p>PrincipalV,
IIT doesn’t count. The gradautes go there so they can get good paying jobs after they graduate. We are not just talking about the “name” here; we are also talking about the central mission. Many IIT grads work for Microsoft… and when you see some of the Indians in Silicon Valley, they may be IIT grads. Now maybe there’s a coincidence that government jobs in India are particularly prestigious and attractive (I don’t know) and Indian students may want to go to IIT so they can get their foots into the doors. But that’s what I was talking about earlier: you need to align incentives with the organization’s objective. In the US, government jobs are not where the cream of the crops want. We can establish a national university all we want and give it a fancy name and tell people how honorable for you to be there (like the Marine commercials). But it will not attract the best and brighest as long as there are plenty of better paying and more interesting or prestigious jobs in other sectors/industries. We already have the military schools as our living proof; while they are bright on average, they are nowhere near the best and the brightest.</p>
<p>Given the practices in place in our country – the freemarket economy, for example – it’s unlikely that a government-funded, goverment-run national university would ever become more prestigious or more elite than existing top tier schools. Everything from limits on how much professors could be paid to having to get funding from congress in budgets would hamper that. Such a school would be funded and defunded according to the whims of the party in power at the time. There are all sorts of laws involving who can and cannot bid on national works, and how those bids can be accepted – all kinds of restrictions that make national goverment run institutions often subject to excesses of cost without commensurate quality. I’m not saying that <em>all</em> national projects are boondoggles, but that <em>many</em> are, or have these limitations. Take, for example, our “national” railway, Amtrak. It’s anemic compared to the rail systems of other countries, because it’s a political football. </p>
<p>As far as “Berkeley should be a national university?” Why? See this gets at the heart of American culture: if a group or a state or an invidivual has created something of value, Americans in general expect that thing or institution belongs to the people who created it. We don’t nationalize companies because they’re successful. We don’t nationalize sports teams that win all the time. The state of California has, in the past, built a strong university system, because at a time in the past, the state and the people who live in it chose to fund that. It’s now crumbling a bit, but the general American sentiment says that states get to keep what they create, so to speak.</p>
<p>TK, you are right. I quoted 2008 rankings. The 2009 rankings still have 13 US universities in the top 20, and I am still baffled by the inclusion of some foreign universities over some US universities.</p>
I think the crux of the discussion is that the vast majority of Americans would not want a national university with this approach, except maybe for one aimed at particular kinds of domestic service. While we think of universities as training the leaders of tomorrow, we expect the goals and ideas to come *from *these future leaders, not be taught to them. If we wanted to start a national university to train future park rangers, OSHA inspectors, postal workers, etc., it might get support, but few people would consider it the top university in the nation.
As others have pointed out, we don’t need it, either.</p>
<p>Even if they were, or even if you could attract the best and brightest to a civilian service academy, the mission still is not clear. Surely the goal would not simply be to create a school more prestigious than the ones we’ve already got. Why would we want to do that? </p>
<p>I can think of a couple of goals. One would be to cultivate leadership to advance a national industrial policy (aiming toward energy independence for example). Another (possibly in support of the first) would be to develop a cadre of leaders whose primary allegiance is to the whole country (not to any region, company, party or other sectarian cause). Brilliant young experts in engineering, economics, transportation policy, etc., would serve after graduation for a minimum of N years as advisers to the President and Congress. It would be sort of a hybrid between a traditional, merit-based civil service system and a national think tank (not a vocational school for OSHA inspectors and such).</p>
<p>RML although I do not agree with you I find it annoying how all these other posters find american universities to be the best in the world. This is exactly why many countries despise americans because they come off and inane and full of themselves. No I am not saying that ALL americans are like this but the way that you people argue and dileberate things make it seems as though you think that everyone else is inferior. America has all these elite colleges and great education and yet it has so many peoople that have yet to learn that they aren’t the sh**!!</p>
<p>Oxford was “produced” back in the 11th century, and it rose into prominence in 18th and 19th centuries - when Britain was a superpower as rich and powerful as the US is today if not even more so. I doubt that Britain could produce an Oxford today, and I doubt that anything produced today by the US government would be as good a school as Oxford either.</p>
<p>The government founded a federal medical school to serve the military in relatively recent decades (1972). And it’s grown into a respectable medical school, but it’s nowhere near putting a scare into the likes of Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, UC San Francisco, etc.</p>
<p>Hey, any international students who feel that US universities are not among the best in the world are perfectly free and welcome to stay home and attend their own National Universities. They’ll win twice over - they won’t have to put with all those awful Americans who are so full of themselves, and they won’t be stuck with an inferior American education from those second-rate schools like MIT, Harvard, Caltech, Stanford, and Berkeley.</p>
<p>haha^ I never said american universities aren’t some of the best in the world. Trust me I know they are among some of the bests. Its just that some of the threads make it seem like no other countries university is on the same level as american universities. BTW I am not an international student, I live in the US. I dont think that all americans are full of themselves, but I do think that this country has quite a few of these people. Not to say that other countries don’t. </p>
<p>Coureur- I know that you are most likely an intelligent person and so I am simply saying that I don’t like the way that everyone is basically bashing RML, yes his question was confusing and irrelevant, but if this country is the land of freedom of speech let him or her express their ideas and if you disagree don’t just bash the person on their thinking but instead simply state your point of view and if the person doesn’t change their thinking that’s there issue.</p>
<p>And hell I know that my home country, jamaica, has no universities that are at the level at which Harvard, Yale, and all the other elite sschools are at. But I am simply stating that these elite colleges arent the best in the world. They are among the best. I for one don’t have any opinion as to which university is the best in the world. I hope you understand what I am trying to say.</p>