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Global Competition, US Research Universities, and International Doctoral Education: Growth and Consolidation of an Organizational Field

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Abstract

The heightened mobility of resources, ideas, and cultural practices across national borders—commonly known as “globalization”—entails changes in the contexts in which US research universities operate. We draw on recent developments in neo-institutional theory to understand these changes and their implications for the ways in which US universities compete for international doctoral students. Quantitative analyses of university-level data from 1990 to 2006 identify significant predictors of growth in this field, including state appropriations and state-supported research expenditures for public universities and net tuition receipts and number of full-time faculty members for private universities. We also highlight the ways in which returns have intensified, declined, or held relatively constant over time.

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Notes

  1. Fligstein and McAdam (2011, 2012) posit a third mechanism by which fields may change. “Invasion,” such as an investment group’s hostile takeover of an industrial firm, can destabilize the field’s hierarchy by bringing new cultural practices and material resources into the field. Because such events are rare in a field dominated by public and nonprofit actors, we focus instead on macroevents and field collisions.

  2. One minor exception to this rule is variables on which a university reports a value of $0. For example, several private universities indicate that they received $0 in state-supported R&D expenditures for a particular year. In these cases, we substitute $1 for $0 because the natural logarithm of zero is undefined. By contrast, the natural logarithm of one is zero, which accurately expresses the value of this variable for the case in question.

  3. While the Council of Graduate Schools (2008) provides data on sector-wide averages, these data are neither disaggregated to the level of individual campuses nor available in a panel format that would facilitate their use in our analysis.

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Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a Grant from the American Educational Research Association which receives funds for its “AERA Grants Program” from the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant #DRL-0941014. Opinions reflect those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies. The authors also thank Sondra Barringer for her invaluable assistance with IPEDS data, and Jim Hearn and two anonymous reviewers for their astute comments on the manuscript.

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  1. The University of North Texas, 1155 Union Circle #310829, Denton, TX, 76203-5017, USA

    Barrett J. Taylor

  2. Michigan State University, East Lansing, USA

    Brendan Cantwell

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Taylor, B.J., Cantwell, B. Global Competition, US Research Universities, and International Doctoral Education: Growth and Consolidation of an Organizational Field. Res High Educ 56, 411–441 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-014-9355-6

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