Are Elite Universities Loosing Their Competitive Edge?

Are Elite Universities Loosing Their Competitive Edge?

In the article titled "Are Elite Universities Losing Their Competitive Edge", the researchers set out to determine if there has been a decline in a university's drawing power due to the lack of productive research colleagues. The study showed that there was a positive effect of being affiliated with an elite university in the 1970's; this same effect was weakened in the 1980's, and disappeared in the 1990's (Kim, Morse & Zingales, 2006).

Hypothesis

With the fear of increasing web-based classrooms and the fear of declining traditional style teaching, college and universities have increased its ability to provide internet based classes to stay competitive. Along the same thought, the question is how the internet can modify other university production processes; mainly research.

How the Hypothesis is Used

In determining whether the internet has affected a university's ability to conduct research, several questions arose. When traditional research was done at a university, communication was expensive and difficult. Moving large amounts of data from university to university proved to be the extremely difficult which made sharing information very tedious. With the introduction of internet based research there is much less localized based research done in a controlled environment. Did localized research become less important? If so, how does that decline affect the value added of elite universities and their competitive edge for research? The measurements used to determine whether elite schools are losing their competitive edge, is based on output measured by the number of pages produced in academic journals and articles, and tracking individual personal across universities.

Internet based research, mostly conducted through online surveys, have proved to be very inexpensive and somewhat effective and somewhat skewed (Kim, Morse & Zingales, 2006). Internet based research, as compared to university, or localized researched is cheaper, but not necessarily more effective. The edge elite universities have over internet based research is that universities have the ability to still conduct localized research, while still conducting internet based research. How does this affect the universities ability to stay competitive?