A BETTER IOWA

Inconsequential research driving up education costs

Gerald F. Smith
A Better Iowa contributor

Responding to the high cost of higher education and rising student indebtedness, the Board of Regents, State of Iowa, has engaged a consulting firm to conduct an efficiency study of the three Regents universities. The consultant's initial report identified 175 opportunities for improvement but overlooked a major inefficiency: the production of inconsequential research, research that doesn't yield enough benefits—economic, cultural, or otherwise—to justify its creation.

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Academic research can be valuable in many ways. Though difficult to measure, research value falls along a continuum, from work that is enormously beneficial to studies that have no plausible impact. Too much of the latter is produced. Humanities scholars struggle to find important things to say about centuries-old topics. Were more than a few of the 18,800 scholarly articles on Shakespeare, published between 1986 and 2008, really valuable? Waste also occurs in practical disciplines. Managers complain that business school research is irrelevant to their needs. Faculty research is expensive, an estimated $400,000 for every article published in top-tier journals. These resources should not be wasted.

Why do we have this problem? Faculty teach, conduct research, and perform service in proportions that vary across types of institutions. Faculty at prestigious research universities might teach one to three courses a year while their colleagues at lower-level teaching universities teach five courses each semester. Though teaching is mandatory, research attracts faculty time and attention. It results in publications, leading to tenure, promotions, and job offers from other institutions. University rankings are driven by research, so institutions encourage faculty to publish. Along with growing public demand for higher education, individual and institutional incentives have increased the production of research, much of which is inconsequential.

The over-production of research might be prevented if universities shifted faculty workloads from research to teaching. Alas, educational institutions have instead become more research-oriented. A study found that, between 1998 and 2003, the average weekly time social science faculty spent teaching declined 42 minutes, to 8.9 hours.

Contributing to the production of inconsequential research is the assumption that knowledge has value and should be created for its own sake. Yes, but that value may be much less than its cost. Inconsequential research wouldn't be produced if the publication process kept it from being published. But editors rarely make the importance of research findings a requirement for publication and publishers are happy to produce more scholarly journals they can sell, at outrageous prices, to university libraries.

Unable to justify academic research on its merits, some argue that it's necessary for effective teaching. If there's a correlation among faculty between teaching effectiveness and research productivity, its effects are overwhelmed by competition for time, which tempts research-oriented faculty to shortchange their students. In fact, most universities employ instructors who don't conduct research but are outstanding teachers.

What should be done? Higher education should place more emphasis on teaching. This would happen spontaneously if valid measures of educational quality motivated students to enroll in schools where they'd be well educated. Since the value of a discipline's research may not match the educational demand for its knowledge, teaching loads in all institutions should vary across departments.

Evaluation and reward systems should focus on the impact of faculty activities. Instead of having standardized workloads, individual faculty should engage in the mixture of teaching, research, and service that maximizes their contribution. Rather than focusing on the number of publications, the tenure process should have candidates demonstrate that their work has impact.

Inconsequential academic research contributes significantly to the cost of higher education, leaving students and parents burdened with debt or unable to afford the education they need. Faculty are too valuable a societal resource to be wasted in such trivial pursuits.