161,118 research outputs found

    Grants, Contracts and the Division of Labor in Academic Research

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    This paper aims to shed light on the division of labor among types of research sponsors and among universities. It interprets data on grants and contracts as conveying information on the sponsorsÂ’ objectives and on the nature of the sponsored institutions. Building on this idea, the paper investigates some notions that appear to be fairly common: That more prestigious universities tend to rely more on grant funding relative to contract funding; that less prestigious research universities tend to rely more heavily on contracts; that grant (contract) funding tends to be associated with basic (applied) research; and that types of sponsors differ in their use of grants versus contracts, depending on their institutional commitment to knowledge as a public good.

    Strategies for Improving the Diversity of the Health Professions

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    Evaluates programs and strategies that were designed to increase the number of underrepresented African Americans, Native Americans, and Latinos in the health professions in California. Includes recommendations

    National models of ISR: Belgium

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    The Edna McConnell Clark Foundation's Tropical Disease Research Program: A 25-Year Retrospective Review 1976-1999

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    Documents and details the foundation's commitment to the program from its inception, and provides an analysis of its successes until the completion of the program in 1999

    “Excellence R Us”: university research and the fetishisation of excellence

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    The rhetoric of “excellence” is pervasive across the academy. It is used to refer to research outputs as well as researchers, theory and education, individuals and organisations, from art history to zoology. But does “excellence” actually mean anything? Does this pervasive narrative of “excellence” do any good? Drawing on a range of sources we interrogate “excellence” as a concept and find that it has no intrinsic meaning in academia. Rather it functions as a linguistic interchange mechanism. To investigate whether this linguistic function is useful we examine how the rhetoric of excellence combines with narratives of scarcity and competition to show that the hypercompetition that arises from the performance of “excellence” is completely at odds with the qualities of good research. We trace the roots of issues in reproducibility, fraud, and homophily to this rhetoric. But we also show that this rhetoric is an internal, and not primarily an external, imposition. We conclude by proposing an alternative rhetoric based on soundness and capacity-building. In the final analysis, it turns out that that “excellence” is not excellent. Used in its current unqualified form it is a pernicious and dangerous rhetoric that undermines the very foundations of good research and scholarship

    Higher education reform: getting the incentives right

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    This study is a joint effort by the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) and the Center for Higher Education Policy Studies. It analyses a number of `best practicesÂż where the design of financial incentives working on the system level of higher education is concerned. In Chapter 1, an overview of some of the characteristics of the Dutch higher education sector is presented. Chapter 2 is a refresher on the economics of higher education. Chapter 3 is about the Australian Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS). Chapter 4 is about tuition fees and admission policies in US universities. Chapter 5 looks at the funding of Danish universities through the so-called taximeter-model, that links funding to student performance. Chapter 6 deals with research funding in the UK university system, where research assessments exercises underlie the funding decisions. In Chapter 7 we study the impact of university-industry ties on academic research by examining the US policies on increasing knowledge transfer between universities and the private sector. Finally, Chapter 8 presents food for thought for Dutch policymakers: what lessons can be learned from our international comparison
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