In research sweepstakes, top private universities are lapping the publics

Doubtless true, but a fascinating story in Businessweek points to a bigger threat to retaining Emmert and keeping the UW's research edge. The story's title explains it well: "The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League."

The Ivies and other leading private universities have been pulling ahead of the publics at an increasing rate, the survey reports. One study shows that research productivity (number of academic publicitions and citations) now runs twice as high in privates versus public universities. Pay for the average full professor, now $106,496 at the leading public universities, has slipped from 91 percent of the top privates to 78 percent today.

Soaring endowments are one reason the privates are widening the gap with their public cousins. Harvard last year earned a staggering $5.7 billion on its endowment. While the publics watch their state legislatures scale back spending growth, the Big Three of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have doubled their operating budgets in the past decade. That compares to the 26 percent rise of the CPI during the decade and a 41 percent increase for all colleges and universities. Meanwhile, the Ivies educate a mere 1 percent of American college students, compared to 75 percent going to public colleges and universities.

To get a sense of the money being thrown around at the top, consider this story from Yale:

The Ivies' superior spending power puts even the finest public universities at a disadvantage in the competition for faculty. One of the many academic areas in which Yale has brought its financial muscle to bear is physics, which until recently was chaired by Ramamurti Shankar. "Yale told us: Let's go after who you want. We will make it happen,'" says Shankar, who is particularly proud of having bested several other top private schools to lure the quantum mechanics expert Steven M. Girvin away from Indiana University, a Big Ten public stalwart. "There was a huge war," Shankar says. "Everybody wanted him." Shankar declines to disclose the price he paid for Girvin in 2002, but says that the going annual rate today for theoreticians of his caliber is $400,000 to $600,000, which includes salary and research support. This is for an assistant professor, the level at which Yale does most of its hiring. The price tag for top experimentalists, who have far more extensive laboratory needs, is $1.5 million to $2 million, according to Shankar, who remains on the Yale faculty.

The University of Washington, primarily due to its grant-getting prowess, is keeping pace better than most. President Emmert has forged a very good political alliance with Gov. Gregoire and the Legislature, so in the past session the UW managed to remedy some of the damage done by a stingy Legislature in the past decade. It's doing well with its seven-year $2.5 billion fundraising campaign, called Creating Futures.

But catching up and paying the president handsomely won't really keep the UW in this high-stakes game. Tuition is low. The Legislature gives stingily but still insists on micromanaging. Federal funding for medical research, the UW's great strength, is getting brutally competitive. "You are going to have an edge in research if you have great students, but not too many students; freedom from bureaucratic and political meddling; and generous alums who are more interested in academics than the football program," the article quotes James D. Adams, acting head of economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a private college in Troy, N.Y. Those are big hurdles for the publics.