Recent scholars of the professions have argued that a new hybrid form of professionalism is becoming dominant. This new form combines traditional commitments to ethics and community service with new commitments to managerial and entrepreneurial objectives. We analyze the perceptions of 4,300 U.S. graduate students in 21 fields concerning how well…

The trend toward continuous expansion of U.S. post-secondary enrollments was reversed in the 2010s. Using pooled state-level data in between-within models, we examine public higher education enrollment trends during the 2009-2019 period. We emphasize variation in the net associations of covariates by tiers. State economic conditions showed…

For U.S. research universities, cluster hiring has become a popular means to add faculty members in university-defined priority fields. The expectation of advocates is that these faculty members will collaborate on high-impact research. Utilizing a national sample of 168 cluster-hire faculty members from eight U.S. research universities, we find…

Extending and expanding Geiger and Feller's (1995) analysis of increasing dispersion in R&D expenditures during the 1980s, the paper analyzes publication and citation counts as well as R&D expenditures for 194 top producers using Web of Science data. We find high and stable levels of inequality in the 1990s and 2000s, combined with robust…

Over the last three decades, interdisciplinary cluster hiring programs have become popular on research university campuses as an approach to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration. These programs have not yet been rigorously evaluated across multiple institutions and multiple thematic fields. The paper reports the results of a survey of 199…

We consider features of cocurricular activities as important learning environments outside of the classroom. Using survey data from seven large public research universities we investigated 17 specific learning opportunities that occur in student clubs and organizations. We found that cocurricular learning experiences are common and that students…

The Student Experience in the Research University (SERU) Project is a collaborative effort among academic scholars and institutional researchers devoted to collecting new data and providing policy-relevant analysis of exactly these questions. Its purpose is to study in depth the undergraduate experience and, at the same time, through systematic…

This paper assesses the causes and consequences of recent American efforts to configure the research university as an engine of economic and social change. Drawing upon interviews and strategic plans, the paper describes recent policies to encourage "interdisciplinary creativity," in a context of increasing income from private gifts and endowments.

Many leaders of public research universities worry about falling behind private research universities at a time when private university finances have improved dramatically and state support for higher education has declined. In this paper, I provide grounds for a more optimistic view of the competitive position of public research universities. I…

Following landmark legislation passed more than 20 years ago, university-industry relationships have now become central to understanding the changing role of research universities in American Society. The paper analyzes the development of university-industry partnerships during the 1990s. Past studies have used a broad array of measures of ties…