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Week 3: Types and Characteristics of Universities Higher education in America is an endlessly complex industry. It has providers of all sizes and quality operating within many different organizational structures with distinct ownership models. These institutions have diverse missions, and compete in many highly differentiated markets. An American cultural peculiarity assigns the same words to describe all these institutions. We call them colleges, schools, or universities. While everyone knows the difference between a trade school, a community college, a religious sectarian institution, a private elite undergraduate college, or a major public research university, nonetheless, when Americans talk about higher education they often use the words colleges, schools, and universities interchangeably, even to refer to the same institution. This device reflects the public confusion about the structure of American higher education, homogenizes the complexity of the academic environment, and obscures the great American achievement of a diverse and adaptable higher education industry. At the same time, however, it reflects the core belief that higher education is about "schooling" that is the acquisition of knowledge on a range of academic subjects. Note that the confusion about the word "school" is reflected in the following entry in Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/school]: North America and the United States. In North America, the term school can refer to any educational institution at any level, and covers all of the following: preschool (for toddlers), kindergarten, elementary school, middle school (also called intermediate school or junior high school, depending on specific age groups and geographic region), senior high school, college, university, and graduate school. American higher education falls into various overlapping categories. Community colleges, derived from an extension of high school and once called junior colleges, provide the first two years of a liberal arts degree and the full two-years or more of various vocational and technical certifications. Community and technical colleges have a tremendous following. They provide remediation for college-bound but under-prepared high school students, a low-cost entry into baccalaureate degree programs, and variable and adaptable vocational and technical education to large numbers of students. These colleges, located in and directly serving their communities, enjoy high public esteem and strong political support. Most community colleges operate in the public sector although some proprietary for-profit and a number of private not-for-profit examples also exist. Many proprietary two-year institutions offer principally vocational training but in recent years the for-profit institutions have expanded not only into producing two-year academic programs but also proprietary four-year degrees. The market share of for profit colleges, however, is quite small. Originally funded by local school districts, most public community colleges have become dependent on state tax-based support and various federally sponsored programs. Many now also charge tuition and a variety of fees and distribute financial aid. In some states, community colleges, four-year colleges, and universities compete for some of the same students and the same state dollars. In addition, in several states, community college have expanded their domains to provide four-year baccalaureat programs in a variety of fields, competing directly with other four-year institutions in their regions. Each definable sector of the American higher education industry has an association that represents its interests in Washington and the states and provides extensive information about that sector on its website. For the community colleges, the American Association of Community Colleges provides this service. Liberal arts colleges deliver a relatively standardized four-year curriculum. Characterized for the most part by relatively small size (1,000 to 5,000 students), and modest to non-existent graduate education or research activity, the range of institutions in this category is wide. Small private sectarian institutions provide religious instruction along with a liberal arts curriculum and offer an intellectually safe environment with predictable social, moral, and ethical values. Prestigious and expensive liberal arts colleges serve elite constituencies in a highly secular and competitive mode. They often create innovative and experimental intellectual, academic, and cultural environments. The sectarian and most of the prestige liberal arts colleges exist in the private sector. No single organization represents all of these colleges, but the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AACU) provides a perspective on the issues relevant to this category of institutions. Many of these institutions have expanded their programs in recent years to encompass a range of graduate programs in an effort to generate additional revenue. In-between these institutions lies a wide range of generic public, private not-for profit, and private for-profit four-year institutions that serve primarily local or regional constituencies although some for-profit colleges operate online on a national scale. They offer liberal arts degrees and applied undergraduate degrees in education, business, nursing, allied health, or engineering. They enroll anywhere from 3,000 to 15,000 or sometimes more students. They often have professionally oriented masters and perhaps a doctoral program or two. They enroll students at varying price points from relatively low cost public to expensive private for-profit institutions, and they usually have only modest if any participation in the national research enterprise. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) provides a trade group for the public institutions in this category and expresses many of their concerns and values. Major public and private research universities in the United States follow a narrow range of organizational models. Although the internal details and relationships vary, the basic structures remain similar. They range in size from small, elite, graduate and undergraduate institutions of perhaps 5,000 students or even less to large public research universities reaching over 50,000 students or more. Some divide the graduate and undergraduate missions into two organizational clusters, but most operate both levels of instruction within the same faculty. They have a major commitment to research and graduate education through professional, Ph.D., and post-doctoral levels. They have large contract and grant revenues, and many will include major enterprises in medicine and, in public universities, agriculture. Most of the criticism of American universities focuses on elite institutions (both the small elite colleges and the elite public and private research universities) not only because of their size and prestige but also because their standards apply in greater or lesser measure to all other higher education institutions in America. Two organizations speak for these institutions. The Association of American Universities (AAU) self-selects, using somewhat arbitrary criteria, what its membership regards as the most prestigious private and public research universities and then represents these institutions and their interests in national forums. Many, but by no means all, of the nation's 200 or so significant and productive research universities fall within the sixty or so members of this group. In addition, the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities (APLU) [formerly National Association of State Universities and Land Grant Colleges, NASULGC] serves as an umbrella organization for large powerful public research universities as well as more modest state institutions. The public members of the AAU all belong to APLU. Obviously these associations overlap, and many institutions pay dues to two or more organizations. Overall representation of higher education comes from the American Council on Education (ACE) which represents institutions of all sizes, organization, ownership, and mission. This does not exhaust the trade groups that represent university interests, but provides a sample of some of the most significant organizations in this category. Academics who manage universities must understand their institution's place in the national structure of higher education and recognize its competitive niche. Big public research universities cannot become liberal arts colleges, nor can a liberal arts college offer the range of services available at a large public land-grant institution. Major private research universities cannot provide the same services to the public as the public land-grant institutions. University competition is intense, and institutions compete against similar institutions for some things, and against much different institutions for others. To assume a simple model of higher education competition obscures these distinctions and misrepresents the obstacles to and opportunities for institutional success. One manifestation of the confusion surrounding our definitions of "university or college" is the dramatic expansion of the ranking industry. Rankings of American colleges and universities has reached epidemic proportions, and the determined effort to categorize institutions has spread overseas as well to encompass the world. Ranking exists because there are so many institutions of such varied character, size, and composition, that most people have a difficult task sorting them. Because the university and college business is highly competitive, each institution sells itself as being the best, advertises its remarkable qualities, and showcases its many singular accomplishments. The most successful commercial enterprise to identify this opportunity has been US News & World Report whose best college rankings have become a publishing phenomenon much imitated by other magazines such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, Barrons, and many other publications. The ranking business, while profitable for many commercial publications, is nonetheless highly controversial and the intense interest has made ranking an international phenomenon. The key issue in rankings is, of course, the methodology used. In most rankings the goal has been to identify university or college characteristics that are assumed to be of interest to the public, often in theory aimed at students or prospective students and their parents. The notion is that a good ranking would produce something akin to a Consumer Reports guide for consumers of higher education. However, the data to achieve this kind of ranking are elusive because the inputs and outputs of college are varied and of variable importance to different constituencies. Moreover, much of what a consumer might want to know about college life is not easily identified through existing statistics. As a result, the college rankings in the United States have tended to revert to primarily reputation-based scores with some weighting related to the quality of the admitted student body and other similar statistical characteristics. A difficulty in these rankings is that the actual quality of colleges and universities does not vary on an annual basis and the difference between similar colleges are so minor as to be mostly insignificant. To resolve this dilemma and keep the rankings fresh (and sell the magazines in which they appear) many commercial rankings revise their methodologies from year to year thereby changing the resulting order of institutions included. Also, they often use rankings schemes significantly complex that minor annual variations will move institutions up or down on the scale. A special case of rankings occurs when a government agency--state and now more recently federal--seeks to impose policy prescriptions on higher education by generating a ranking based on political goals and then drive funding based on the ranking scores. Some states have used this method to allocate some or in a few cases most state funding. The federal government seeks to force institutions to charge less and produce more graduates who they hope will end up with high paying jobs. These programs generate significant costs to the universities and colleges that must generate the information and distort the operations of the institution to meet the political goals of the state. This form of ranking-based intervention is of course reminiscent of efforts to improve public schools, most of which produced relatively modest results at considerable cost. Usually, the process is highly political, causes great commotion, distorts some of the university's operations, generates both cost and administrative bureaucracy, but in the end fails in its purpose and fades into a form of background noise. The extensive literature on rankings of this kind often focus on the circular nature of the process of quantifying reputation. If a college has the reputation of being excellent, and as a result is ranked highly in a major publication, then its reputation will be enhanced for the next cycle of surveys of reputation, thereby creating a self-reinforcing process. If the ranking were designed to show the qualities that justify a good reputation, it would not include an estimate of reputation as a component of the ranking itself. Additionally, the validity of reputation surveys is highly questionable. The methodology presumes that the academics queried about reputation know something about all the many colleges and universities that form part of the survey. In general, it is unlikely that even the best informed academics have significantly detailed knowledge of the internal operations of even 50 colleges, let along the thousand involved in these surveys. And even when someone may know something in detail about ten colleges, they are not likely to know about changes that take place from year to year as is implied in the annual surveys. As a result, the reputation results are mostly a word of mouth notion related to name recognition and historical prestige. As these rankings are of interest to alumni and politicians, colleges and universities work hard to show up well in the surveys and the data. They find many ways to manipulate the data, and we see heavy advertising blitzes in periodicals read by academic administrators (who do the reputation scores) extolling the virtues and significance of relatively less well-known institutions. Nonetheless, in America, ranking is a favorite game, and almost all universities publish good rankings results on their websites even when they know the methodology to be fatally flawed. Better to be seen as prestigious, whatever the source of the reputation. In the special case of the research university, the process is somewhat more complex in one sense and somewhat less arbitrary in another. Because research is a nationally competitive business and the process of grants and publications and other research related awards of one kind or another are visible to all, it is less difficult to identify the top research institutions than it is to identify the top undergraduate colleges. The most significant identifier of research preeminence in America is the amount of federally awarded research expenditures of each university each year. As these funds are primarily awarded based on peer review, this indicator has validity as a reasonable indicator of the total research prowess of each institution's faculty and staff. The Top American Research Universities publication and website provides an example of this form of ranking. However, as the ranking business has spread overseas, the ranking issues become more complex. Universities and nations believe that one of the key elements in the success of American business and industry has been the success of its university-based research establishment. Other countries with research universities work to improve the ones they have and those without rush to build them. To mark the success of a national effort to improve research university performance within the global context, a number of international university ranking projects have emerged. Most of these have a national origin, designed to match the performance of national universities against the world market for research preeminence. Absent the unifying structure of the US federal research funding competition, the international projects look at a number of other variables, but primarily they focus on publications. The notion here is that research requires publication and therefore the number of publications, mostly focused on scientific journals, can serve as a good indicator of research productivity on an international scale. However, the academic community does not regard all publications as being equal. Some are are more important or significant than others. Also, not all articles in a publication are of equal value, some change the way we think about the world and others fade into obscurity. To address this problem, ranking schemes can do citation counts which measure the number of times a given article is cited by other scholars. This is seen as a refinement in the methodology but it also introduces a number of data challenges. Some are ordinary such as the difficulty of knowing exactly who is who when authors have the same last names and the same first initials. Some are more complex such as the difficulty of dealing with disciplines that have papers with many authors and those with just a few authors. Sometimes as well the issue of where the citation is made becomes significant. If an article is cited many times but by authors who publish in second category publications should it count as much as an article cited fewer times but by authors who publish in premier publications? And, moreover, how do we determine the premier and the secondary publications? Some international rankings use reputation surveys to enhance their rankings, but here too the problem of circularity appears. If we all know that Oxford is a great university but we do not know much about the University of Queensland, in Australia, how valid can our reputation impressions be? The considerable literature on ranking issues and validity is well worth reading, but whatever the system, the enormous pressure to show well on these rankings indicates the great importance the world places on the performance of research universities. When thinking about managing research universities, it helps to consider some of the following issues:
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