America’s Educational Superpower Is Fading

The United States has been a leader in higher education since the Massachusetts legislature founded Harvard College in 1636, six years after the Puritans landed and established the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Americans built the world’s first mass university system with the creation of land-grant universities via the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890. They mixed the world’s two most successful models of higher education — the German research university and the Oxbridge residential college — into a uniquely powerful synthesis in the 1890s. The 20th century has seen the US invent the high-tech research park, the multiversity, the commuter college and, cynics might add, the university as hedge fund.

In many respects the US remains the global pacemaker today. American universities occupy 19 of the top 30 slots in the 2023 Times Higher Education Supplements’ ranking of the world’s universities. The US has by far the largest concentration of Nobel Prize winners. Nine of the top ten richest universities are in the US (the odd man out is the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia). Harvard University’s top ranking on that list, with an endowment of more than $50 billion, didn’t prevent Kenneth Griffin, the founder and CEO of Citadel (and a voluble critic of academic leftism), from writing a check for $300 million.