How Many Universities Does A Country Need? (Wolff)

This question is prompted by visits to a number of smaller (in terms of population) countries in the past year or two: what counts as a saturation point for a country in terms of having enough universities? To focus the question, consider only those universities - call them research universities - which can award PhDs, and actually do so on a regular basis. Of course universities differ in size, but still, based on nothing more than a few alcohol-fuelled conversations with philosophers from Estonia, Denmark, Norway, Ireland, Croatia, Hungary, Israel and Portugal, here is my thesis: a country is unlikely to be able to sustain much more than one research university for each million of its population.

By this calculation the US should have about 275 research universities, the UK about 60, Canada 30, and Australia 20. You can check out the populations of the countries of the world here. I don't know how to check how many PhD awarding institutions there are in different countries. The figures work out reasonably well for the UK. There are more than 60 universities, but some of these barely have a research mission. Canada and Australia can't be too far off. As for the US, is 275 a reasonable estimate of the number of research universities?

Of course there are many developing countries which have nothing like one university per million. But I'm interested to know whether this is a reasonable maximum. Are there countries which manage to have more than (roughly) one PhD awarding institution per million? And has there been any discussion of this question?

Comments

[Ian B Gibson]

Why specifically 1 million? Why not 500,000 or 2 million? The first figure would mean the UK (for instance) could sustain 120 research universities, whereas the latter would mean only 30. So it makes a big difference. Where do we get the figures from (other than down the pub)?

[Roger Mexico]

What about the fact that many foreign-born people come to the U.S. to earn advanced degrees? I'm not sure about the numbers or anything myself, but I have heard a lot of students complain about how they can't understand their math/physics/engineering TA because of an accent. (Take that anecdotal evidence for what's it worth of course.)

[John Wilkins]

There are 40 universities in Australia. I think nearly all of them award PhDs. This makes us over double the amount we should have.

Of course, many of these are supported by international students (but few of those are PhD students, of course).

[Matt Burstein]

No need to guess about the numbers of research institutions; the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has a system for classifying Higher Ed institutions based on what sorts of degrees they distribute (among other criteria). The main classifications page is here:

http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/

The search options are here:

"http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/index.asp?key=807"

I leave it as an assigment for readers to dig in and do the counting.

[Anton R. Schep]

If I use the classification of the AMS, then almost all math Ph.D's are produced in Group I, II and III universities, which total 181. My feeling is that this number will be closer to what can be reasonably called "research universities" than the 275. I think the predicted number is certainly wrong for France, because of the centralization of most research in Paris. Also for the Netherlands I count twelve universities with 15.8 million inhabitants.

[Matt King]

Here is a link to the new Carnegie classification summary.
http://www.carnegiefoundation.org/classifications/index.asp?key=805
In the middle of the first list you will see:
RU/VH: Research Universities (very high research activity)
RU/H: Research Universities (high research activity)
DRU: Doctoral/Research Universities

The sum of the number of institutions under these three categories is 283. Which is remarkably close to your 1 per one million estimate, since the current US population estimate is closer to 300 million than to 275 million.

[Richard]

New Zealand has seven, with a population of just 4 million.

[Finnsense]

Finland has 5.2m people and many more than five Phd awarding institutions. I can think of nine traditional universities but they also have universities of technology which award Phds and business universities which do the same.

Unsurprisingly, if you throw a stone here, you'll hit someone with a Phd.

[David Hunter]

5 million Richard, if you count the one million Kiwis outside the national borders.

[TheJew]

I don't understand why we should have more then one university. The whole point of an academe is to recognize increasing returns to scale in intellectual exploration. Why not put it all in one geographical place and let the increasing returns to scale get really big?

[Mike Jostedt]

The biggest problem that I can think of with only having 275 research universities in the U.S. is that dissenting and revolutionary opinions can thrive at Universities which are not focused on research. This is necessary in Philosophy most definitely. In some sense if Philosophy, or any other discipline is kept to such a small amount of Universities then some of the most interesting students will just fall to the wayside while the "yes" women and men will suceed.

[harry b]

Doesn't size factor in? American research universities tend to be very large relative to British and Irish (the other countries I know). So shouldn't there be fewer (but really big) research universities in America per million people. I doubt that California has 30 research universities, but I bet it has at least as large a number of academics doing serious and semi-serious research per head as the UK.

[Peter]

What justification is there for saying there are "increasing returns to scale in intellectual exploration" ?

Such a conclusion assumes some knowledge of where new ideas come from. I have yet to see any general theory about the sources of new ideas. For some thinkers, new ideas arise when the thinker is alone, and has time to ponder and write, in quiet isolation. For other thinkers, the cacophony of argument, contestation and disagreement is necessary for new ideas to emerge.

Whilesoever we have no generally-applicable theory of the source of new ideas, I doubt that anything meaningful can be said about economies of scale in intellectual exploration.

[Thom Brooks]

This is a fascinating question. For one thing (against the view of one commentator above), I think it ridiculous to assume there should be only one university....but it looks like a troll message so I'll just leave it at that.

My guess is that perhaps (as much as I am all in favour of the expansion of higher education) one university for every one million people is a bit much. Thinking only of my beloved state of Connecticut, the major research universities are clearly Yale followed by UConn and then by Wesleyan, Central SCU, and Southern SCU, perhaps CT College, too. That's two admittedly very major PhD awarding universities followed by a handful...and I simply don't know if all the others award PhD's or not (and my apologies for not knowing). In terms of research universities, I would have thought that my home state of 5+ million people had two or three...although a great many other colleges/universities of note (not least Trinity College, etc.).

All that said, it is a good question. How much should each country have? Do some countries support too many or too few? No easy answers.

[TheJew]

What do you want, an annotated bibliography? Fine.

The following two papers show that higher human capital in cities increases wages among all types of workers, even other high human capital workers.

Rauch 1993, “Productivity gains from geographic concentration of human capital: Evidence from the cities”, Journal of Urban Economics 34
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=227359

Moretti 2004, "Estimating the Social Return to Higher Education: Evidence From Longitudinal and Repeated Cross-Sectional Data" Journal of Econometrics 121(1-2)
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~moretti/socret.pdf

This paper looks at population and productivity growth among cities since 1960 and finds that higher initial human capital creates higher growth.

Glaeser, Scheinkman, and Sheiler 1995, “Economic growth in a cross section of cities”, Journal of Monetary Economics 36(1)
http://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/5013.html

While you may argue that wages are not a good measurement of intellectual productivity, the following four papers look at patent generation and find evidence of knowledge spillover effects:

Adams and Jaffe 1996, “Bounding the effects of R&D: An investigation using matched establishment firm data”, Rand journal of economics 27(4)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=39020

Jaffe, Trajtenberg, and Henderson 1993, “Geographic localization of knowledge spillovers as evidenced by patent citation”, Quaterly Journal of Economics 108(3)
http://ideas.repec.org/a/tpr/qjecon/v108y1993i3p577-98.html

Zucker, Darby, and Brewer 1998, “Intellectual human capital and the birth of US biotechnology enterprises”, American Economic Review 88(1)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0002-8282(199803)88%3A1%3C290%3AIHCATB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-%23

Moreitti 2004, "Workers' Education, Spillovers and Productivity: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions" American Economic Review 94(3)
http://www.econ.berkeley.edu/~moretti/text8.pdf

Post Script: Why am I a troll? Is it because I am concise?

[Jo Wolff]

A brief note: I don't know what a 'troll' is, and don't much want to be educated on this, thanks. More importantly I don't want the issue of who is, and who isn't a troll, and how we might know, taking place here (one right of reply is enough, and has been exercised), and so will exercise editorial judgement accordingly.

[Patrick Connolly]

It seems to me that, speaking just in terms of philosophy, one Ph.D. awarding institution per million is too much. I base this on the fact that there are so many philosophy ph.d.'s who can't get work (or the kind of work they want).

One could take two directions here. One could blame it on the students for entering programs knowing full well how few jobs there are. Or one could blame it on the universities for compounding the over saturation.

But I am a wee undergrad, and may be terribly wrong.

[robert allen]

Mr. Connolly,

Will all due respect, you ARE terribly wrong. The fault lies with the capitalist lackeys who have taken over the institutions of higher education in this country and increased their own salaries and perks by staffing classes with part-time instructors. Believe me, there is work enough to go around, the problem is that the too few academics are willing to do what it takes to force the above mentioned lackeys to do right by adjuncts.

[Thom Brooks]

None of the papers cited support the quite radical claim that "I don't understand why we should have more then one university. The whole point of an academe is to recognize increasing returns to scale in intellectual exploration. Why not put it all in one geographical place and let the increasing returns to scale get really big?"

Instead, it seems clear that where universities arise, the economic development (and sometimes regeneration) of an area is improved. The articles cited seem to support this claim...and not the commentator's original claim which I took as a bit too provocative.

[Peter]

The claim that there are "increasing returns to scale in intellectual exploration" is not a claim about the economic or social impacts of research, but is about greater-than-proportionate outputs with increased inputs. The papers cited seem to bear on the former, not the latter. My question asking for a justification for claiming increasing returns to scale in intellectural exploration thus remains unanswered.

However, even if this claim were justifiable, the rise of distributed computing and applications thereon would remove any necessity for geographical proximity by researchers. If economies of scale for intellectual exploration were to exist, they could surely be achieved by researchers connected electronically, as readily as those connected physically. Thus, the Internet destroys the consequent argument made by this commentor for One Big University.

[Patrick Connolly]

Mr Allen,

I realize the really wretched set-up that both adjuncts and "instructors" have. The per-class payment rates and lack of health care are both indicative of the irresponsible leadership at many universities.
But I'm not sure that I believe the claim that "there is work enough to go around". I hate numbers, but... there are currently something like 87 universities in the United States that grant Ph.D.'s in philosophy. From looking at the Review of Metaphysics' annual listing of dissertations and graduates it seems fair to say that each of these institutions puts out four graduates a year. This is obviously a rough average, and may be low. 4 X 87 = 348. There are not 348 job openings in philosophy every year (adjunct, bioethics consulting, think tank, tenure-track or otherwise). 348 (or even if we skew the numbers and knock it down to 200) is simply too many.
Perhaps I'm wrong on my numbers. But I know that there are at least 80 programs, and it SEEMS like 4 grad's a year is fair.
Of course, this doesn't mean that 1 research university per 1 million people is too high. It just means that it is too high for philosophy. Ph.D.'s in engineering, science, comp. sci, econ, govt. and other fortunate disciplines can be employed outside of academia. But, philosophers (generally speaking) cannot, and this fact ought to engender more responsiblity among programs accepting large numbers of students.

[Michael Kremer]

Patrick Connolly,

The situation is more complex than you think. I am not sure if the following will lead you to conclude that things are not as bad as you thought, or that they are worse. But here are some facts.

According to the APA, over the 21 year period from 1982-3 to 2002-3, there were 8339 new jobs advertised in Jobs for Philosophers, for an average of 397 jobs per year. Some of these were senior jobs but the majority were entry level. However, there were in the same period 17436 applicants, or an average of 830 per year -- thus overall 2.09 applicants per job. (Of course everyone applies to multiple jobs so that the number of applications received for each job is in the triple digits.) (http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/profession/Candidates.pdf)

However, from 1991 to 1996 there were 1808 PhDs in philosophy awarded in the United States, for an average of 301 per year. So there are in fact considerably fewer new PhDs than jobs advertised. (http://www.apa.udel.edu/apa/profession/phdgre.html)

Brian Weatherson did an analysis of the jobs advertised in Jobs for Philosophers in 2004 at http://brian.weatherson.org/jfp2004a.htm. According to this analysis there were 371 jobs advertised of which 76 were senior, leaving 295 entry level positions of all sorts. This would be almost exactly 1 per PhD awarded, but that would ignore all those applicants who are not brand new PhDs.

Nonetheless there are many more applicants than jobs advertised. Where do all the applicants come from then? Some are already employed philosophers seeking another job -- mostly because there present position is short term -- and many others are unemployed philosophers. I don't know of any statistics on this.

One also has to bear in mind than not all advertised jobs end up being filled.

[robert allen]

Mr. Connolly,

I happen to like #s so here's some for you: class sizes where I teach typically run from 20-35 students. At some colleges, I have had sections with 75 students and no TA. I also had a class cancelled this summer even though 11 students were enrolled: the contract says there must be at least '12' and, by God, the administrators were going to follow it. When I say there is enough work I mean that there are enough students interested in studying philosophy (or being required to take it). If no more than 15 students were allowed in a class, which is really all that an instructor can handle without leaving some behind, every single Ph.D. holder in philosophy could make a living teaching. Furthermore, even if this didn't turn out to be true, in a just society those willing to work- even philosophers- would be GIVEN a job somewhere with a decent wage attached to it. I personally would be willing to clean toilets if I could support my family on the income from it and still have time to write and advance other projects. (I went into philosophy to become a scholar; there are days when I think that I need students like I need a fucking hole in the head.) You realize, don't you, that if the capitalist bastards weren't trying to profit from our labor, we would need to work only 3-4 hours a day to meet all of our needs. (Cf. Juliet Schor, The Overworked American.)

[Jo Wolff]

My thanks to everyone who has contributed. Some unexpected thoughts here, including something like a defence of the labour theory of value, which might be worth a post in its own right some time soon. But I think the discussion has run its course, and if I have mastered the technology I shall now be closing comments on this particular post.