Markets, minds, and money : why America leads the world in university research

"America's educational system excels in at least one area: university-based research. Why? Miguel Urquiola, an economist of education, argues that the key is that the United States takes a free market approach to education. Urquiola begins by showing how dominant American universities are in research, in part by developing a historical database of Nobel Prize winners. He then traces the history of research at American universities from the seventeenth century until today, showing that research was an afterthought at most universities until the nineteenth century. Until the late 1800s, most universities were set up independently by churches to provide the basic services of denominational sorting and teaching. In world-leading Germany, by contrast, the state directed universities to provide the kind of advanced training that would help the country compete internationally. America's system only began to change when certain entrepreneurial universities, free to change their model, realized there was a demand in the industrial economy for students who were better trained by expert teachers and sorted by talent. Johns Hopkins and Cornell led the way, followed by Harvard, Columbia, and various other universities that remain dominant today. By the 1920s, the U.S. had passed Germany and Britain as the home of the world's best university research."