The breakdown of a decades-old bargain between the US government and its research universities is threatening the engine that has driven American productivity and economic growth since the end of World War II, said Harvard Kennedy School dean Jeremy Weinstein.
In conversation with historian and senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, Stephen Kotkin, Weinstein said the assault on higher education that began under US President Donald Trump had exposed how little value was attached to one of America’s greatest exports and a critical driver of its economic growth and innovation.
Kotkin said education was one of the critical factors that enabled the US to rise to be a successful country and a dominant power, but that is now being undermined.
“We had the strongest education system for the longest period of time. I don’t think we can say that anymore, although we still have tremendous strengths in our education,” he said at the Top1000funds.com Fiduciary Investors Symposium.
Weinstein said the post-war settlement rested on federal investment in science routed through universities.
“Vannevar Bush and the Endless Frontier and the investments in science, technology, innovation made it possible for American universities, not just the Ivy League, but what the Carnegie Institution calls R1 universities, which are your most research-active universities, to be the drivers of America’s economic transformation,” he said.
That investment, not undergraduate admissions, was the substance of the deal.
“It’s not a subsidy that’s a gift to American research universities; it’s money that the best scientists in the world compete for in a merit-based process and win in order to produce science that benefits society,” he said.
Kotkin said taxpayers funded private institutions because they were the country’s innovation engine.
“The deal was that the taxpayers are going to fund private institutions, because it is our secret sauce, it’s our innovation,” he said. Places such as Harvard received more federal money than the state schools nominally funded by Massachusetts, he said, because they did the fundamental research across fields as diverse as biomedicine, astronomy and space.
Root of productivity
Weinstein said the US’ continued productivity could be traced directly to that funding.
“When I was a kid, Japan was going to overtake the United States, that’s what I grew up thinking and believing, that was a story that barely lasted for a few years, and you can trace back the extraordinary continued productivity of the United States to what happened in science, technology, and innovation, and you can trace all of that back to federal investments in universities,” he said.
Private and venture capital came in behind those science investments, he said, alongside an inflow of domestic and foreign talent through the higher education system.
The reach of those institutions extends well beyond elite campuses, Weinstein said. The roughly 150 research-active universities were in most places the largest landowner, the largest employer and the largest player in workforce development, he said.
“An assault on international students, an assault on the National Science Foundation, an assault on the National Institutes of Health, an undermining of the student loan program. This is not about Cambridge, Massachusetts,” he said.
“This is about every major public university, research university, in the United States that doesn’t have the insurance of a $60 billion endowment, because that’s what sustains America’s innovation potential.”
The cost was already visible in falling overseas demand, Weinstein said. Some American universities have recorded declines of 25, 30 or 50 per cent in applications from overseas, and the cost was being felt in American science and innovation, in the local economies where the universities are located, and in the vitality of the American economy. Talented foreign students were now being sent to China, Australia, Canada and Europe in preference to the US.
Weinstein said the silence of business, venture capital and the technology chief executives as the assault unfolded had stunned him most. The asset under attack was the country’s comparative advantage, he said, and few were pricing in the long-tail consequences of breaking the compact.
“We just have this massive asset that is incredibly vulnerable,” he said.
However, Weinstein said two things could be true at once: “It can be true that American universities continue to lead the world in scientific productivity, and Harvard is no exception to that; it can also be true that parts of American higher education have become ideologically homogeneous, politically activated, censorious when it comes to speech.”
But even so, “an asset with work to do is an asset that you don’t throw out the window”.
Change at the Kennedy School had not been hard to deliver, Weinstein said. He had refused to police speech or to de-platform speakers, and had reset who appeared in its research centres and on its stages.
A scholarship program announced last July, the American Service Fellowship, offered 50 full scholarships to anyone who had served the country for more than seven years, and he said he had written 27,000 letters to governors, mayors, school superintendents, police chiefs and veterans’ organisations.
“We saw nearly a 250 per cent increase in our domestic applications to the Kennedy School year-on-year, and they came from 48 of 50 states,” Weinstein said.
“It just isn’t that hard to change.”
A sector that needs to advocate for itself
Kotkin said the sector had failed to defend itself because it had never built the case for its own value. It had lost control of its own story: “If you don’t have a marketing department, the most scandalous members of your community become your marketing department,” he said.
As a result, the story of a university’s deep research capability often went untold while a small number of noisy campus activists came to define the institution, he said.
Weinstein said the failure was self-inflicted. For around three-quarters of a century, the higher education sector has taken for granted the idea that the public understands links between foundational science and everyday life.
“The internet was created by [the National Science Foundation], not by two really cool [Graduate School of Business] grads in a garage in Silicon Valley,” he said.
Weinstein said that eight to 10 years from now, beyond the current administration, higher education should focus on three priorities. The first was access. Elite higher education in particular needed to throw open its doors, he said. “It needs to be less of a resource that defines itself by how exclusive it is, and more resource that defines itself by how much it contributes to the world,” he said.
That was not only a change of narrative, Weinstein said, but also a question of who was in the classroom, how far the institution could reach, where it recruited from, and how it could close the financial gaps that stood in the way of access.
The second was building public institutions that actually delivered, which Weinstein said was essential to sustaining democracy.
“This populist surge that we have in the United States and in other advanced economies is deeply anti-institutional. It’s deeply anti-guardrails and constraints. It’s deeply anti-expertise,” he said.
“I still believe in expertise. I still believe in science. I still believe that we are going to be better off if we find a way to marry popular participation with the expertise that we invest in.”
The third was governing the current moment of technological change, Weinstein said.
“Unless we succeed in staffing public institutions with folks that are tech fluent, ready, and able to think about the institutional designs, value trade-offs that are at play, ready to build and deploy in ways that help public institutions succeed, we won’t have met our mission.”
