The Efficient Production of "Reputation" by Prestige Research Universities in the United States.
The focus of this article is on the productivity of prestige research universities in the United States. Its principal (and unique) attribute lies in the exposition of a simple economic model to measure academic productivity. Furthermore, the methodology employed can be used to measure productivity in a single department or college or to compare efficiencies over time or over several organizational units where some common educational output is associated with common inputs. Other, more complex, production functions might also be more satisfactorily fitted to some data sets than the simple relationships explored here. The principal questions examined in this study, then, are concerned with the traditional productive relatedness between inputs and outputs. However, herein the input -and especially the output variables may appear to some readers to be peculiarly defined. These definitions will be discussed further in later paragraphs; suffice it for now to note that there is little agreement on the composition or the nature of the output of research universities. Nevertheless, in this article the surrogate for the output of a research university will be taken to be its reputation, as measured by the aggregate of the ratings of the scholarly quality of its faculty reported in the national assessments sponsored by the Conference Board of Associated Research Councils [10]. Inputs are U.S. Government dollars obligated to a university for research and