But university research is in trouble, and so is an economy more dependent on it than many people understand. Federal funding for basic research—more than half of it conducted on university campuses like this one—has effectively declined since 2008, failing to keep pace with inflation. This is before taking into account Trump administration proposals to slash the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Institutes of Health (NIH) budgets by billions of dollars more.
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While private institutions are better shielded from funding cuts by huge endowments, Midwestern public universities have much thinner buffers. The endowments of the universities of Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois and Ohio State, which together enroll nearly 190,000 students, add up to about $11 billion—less than a third of Harvard’s $37.6 billion...
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These universities have served as bulwarks against a decades-long trend of economic activity fleeing smaller cities and the center of the country for the coasts. Since the 1980s, deregulation and corporate consolidation have led to a drastic hollowing out of the local industries that once sustained heartland cities. But a university can’t just be picked up and moved from Madison to New York in the way a bank, an insurance company, or even a factory can be.
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Meanwhile, global economic rivals have continued to approach and even surpass the level of American research output. The U.S. share of all research and development funding worldwide dropped from more than a third to barely a quarter from 2003 to 2013, the most recent period for which the figures are available. China could catch up by 2030 based on current trends. Last year, Chinese researchers for the first time filed more patents applications in the life sciences than their U.S. counterparts. The historical global leader in science and technology, the United States is now ninth among the nations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in the proportion of gross domestic product spent on research.
Because basic science can take decades to translate into new drugs or products, the consequences of this won’t be immediately visible. That makes it hard to argue for renewed investment in research in a political system that doesn’t prioritize long-term thinking. Nor does private industry always want to invest in the years of research it can take to translate fundamental discoveries into the kind of marketable commodities that drive the American economy—and that often originate at universities.
