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Patents and University Strategies in the Prestige Economy

  • Chapter
Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development

Part of the book series: Higher Education Dynamics ((HEDY,volume 45))

Abstract

Research universities in the US exist in a “prestige economy,” meaning a field that is stratified both by status and by financial resources. University patenting, which promises revenues through the commodification of research discoveries and also signals status, offers a useful lens through which to understand the prestige economy. Analyses of patenting behavior by US research universities from 1988 to 2004 indicate that public university patenting was predicted by industry funding early in the sample period, but came to be predicted by federal and institutional contributions to research. This suggests that public universities may patent because they are expected to do so – that is, as indicators of status – rather than because patents are associated with revenues. Private universities, by contrast, patent in idiosyncratic ways, with a few very active universities joined by many that engage in little or no patenting. This suggests that privates, unlike their public counterparts, pursue patenting selectively and strategically.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We acknowledge that these activities often prove financially dubious, with the costs of research often outweighing the “indirect cost” payments that it generates (Newfield 2009). We pay only scant attention to this point, however, because we seek to describe actual behaviors rather than optimal ones.

  2. 2.

    The exception is 1999–2000, during which academic year the US Department of Education did not collect data on several independent variables of interest in subsequent regression models. Data for the 1999 academic year therefore represent imputed rather than observed values.

  3. 3.

    Because comparatively few private universities secure R&D support from the state, we do not include that measure in our analyses of private universities.

  4. 4.

    We consider co-assigned patents to be the equivalent of 0.5 assigned patents. Due to the distribution of this variable (see Figs. 6.1 and6.2), we employed the logarithmic transformation to reduce the influence of high-leverage outliers (i.e., institutions that produce a large number of patents annually).

  5. 5.

    Such analyses would likely yield biased results, as a regression model that badly estimates relationships for a particular university in 1993 likely yields other poor estimates in 1995 and 1998 (Zhang 2010).

  6. 6.

    Fixed effects regressions de-mean data to analyze within-university variance. Accordingly, regression coefficients indicate predicted changes over time for a given university (Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2012).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Education, University of North Texas, Denton, TX, USA

    Barrett J. Taylor

  2. University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, USA

    Kelly O. Rosinger

  3. Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

    Sheila Slaughter

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  1. Institute of Higher Education, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, USA

    Sheila Slaughter

  2. College of Education, University of North Texas, Denton, Texas, USA

    Barrett Jay Taylor

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Taylor, B.J., Rosinger, K.O., Slaughter, S. (2016). Patents and University Strategies in the Prestige Economy. In: Slaughter, S., Taylor, B. (eds) Higher Education, Stratification, and Workforce Development. Higher Education Dynamics, vol 45. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21512-9_6

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