The Extraordinary Value of Great Universities

The United States is home to more than a third of the world's top 400 research universities. But how exactly do universities factor into the wealth, innovation, and economic competitiveness of their host nations?

To get at this, my colleague Charlotta Mellander and I looked into the statistical associations between a nation’s concentration of leading universities and broader measures of economic competitiveness, innovation, human capital and social well-being. We based our analysis on a statistical technique that enables us to control for the effects of population size. While correlation is not causation (none of these findings prove that anything more than an association exists) the results are nonetheless striking. In fact, they number among the very strongest I have ever seen in this type of analysis.