Texas A&M was found to be one of the least efficient universities from 1989 to 2004 at publishing research according to a study conducted by Jeffrey M. Litwin that measured the average cost of publishing research.
“I focused on a macroeconomic assessment of what are considered to be some of the most research-intensive universities in the United States,” said Litwin, an associate dean at George Brown College in Toronto, Canada.
Looking at a total of 72 universities, Litwin determined the average expense each publication costs to produce by comparing the total number of publications per year with the total funding the university received that year. The least productive universities were considered to be the schools spending the most amount of money per research paper.
The average cost for Texas A&M was $128,269 per paper. Following close behind were Carnegie Mellon University ($118,344/paper) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) ($110,349/paper). The two most productive universities, according to the study, were University of Pennsylvania ($28,547/paper) and Harvard University ($31,231/paper).
The study was discussed in The Chronicle of Higher Education in May of this year and has been presented at the Association for Institutional Research conference and the Congress for Humanities. Comments pertaining to the article claimed the research to be “not very useful” and “criminally presumptuous.”
“Something this study cannot account for is that different areas of science research are more expensive than others,” said James Aune, head of Texas A&M’s Department of Communication. “Social science research tends to be far less expensive than engineering or physics projects, which require expensive labs and equipment to perform.”
Many outright disagreed with Litwin’s approach to measuring universities’ research productivity, but Litwin defended his work, saying it was one contribution to a larger compilation of studies dedicated to this kind of research.
“This study is simply one of many, and you cannot take any measure in isolation,” Litwin said. “My motivation was to continue important research concerning the effectiveness and efficiency of research colleges.”
According to Litwin, measuring research productivity is an important main course served up for concerned politicians and their need for budget cuts due to limited financial resources.
But the underlying problem is that measuring research productivity is rather complex, and when dealing with cuts that could mean fiscal devastation for certain academic research, some find the meat a little too tough to swallow.
“To truly assess a research institution’s productivity or return-on-investment, you have to look at the broad impact of research — including the long- and short-term economic, health, societal, and educational benefits,” said Jeffrey R. Seemann, Texas A&M’s vice president of research.
Although the paper has yet to be published, Litwin is already looking ahead to the next potential measurement. He said that if he continues this study further, he will compare similar departments of different universities. He feels this will provide a more accurate measurement.
Some students were unfazed by the results of the study.
Ruben De La Rosa, Class of 2011, said, “No, my opinion is not changed from the results of this research. The research I did as an undergraduate was very insightful and led me to pursue a full-time job in the lab upon graduation.”