The authors estimate the effects of the quality of the college a student attends on their later earnings using data from a cohort of U.S. college students from the late 1970s and early 1980s. They find economically important earnings effects of college quality for men and women, as well as effects on educational attainment, spousal earnings and other demographic variables. These effects remain roughly constant over time and result primarily from effects on wages, rather than from effects on hours or labor force participation. They find that, over the lower part of the range of college quality, increases in college quality pass a simple social cost-benefit test.

Florida and Cohen lay out the underpinnings of a better conceptual understanding or theory of the university’s role in knowledge-based capitalism. The authors also consider the tensions that the university’s new role is generating and reconsider the notion of the university as an ‘engine’ of economic development. The authors stress the importance of moving away from a limited concept of the university as an engine of economic development and to begin to view the university as a complicated institutional underpinning of regional and national growth.

Rai reviews how the American legal system encourages academics working in biotechnology to attempt to patent their work. She also addresses the financial impact of product licensing on university activities and the role that such licensing plays in restricting the flow of communication essential to the conduct of good science. Rai considers whether or not exclusive patenting is financially beneficial or whether models other than exclusive patenting may be more effective in promoting product development.

Hall suggests that academic institutions and private companies need each other and can provide highly symbiotic and beneficial working environments benefiting society at large. Halls claims that the key to success in these relationships is for both parties to recognize that they may have different needs, agendas, and missions. As long as the distinctions are preserved and recognized, Halls sees no conflicts, arguing that both sides succeed in advancing the research necessary to remain competitive at both the intellectual and economic levels.

Schneiderman discusses Monsanto Company ‘discovery research’ partnerships with universities (in contrast to drug development research). He believes that university-business partnerships are essential to retain U.S. economic competitiveness. Rather than limiting the access of foreign companies to American research universities, Schneiderman advocates for equal access of American scientists, engineers and companies to foreign research and engineering centers. 

This book is a collection of writings produced while Brodhead was Dean of Yale College. The first section focuses how undergraduates can get the most from their undergraduate education. Later sections focus on familiar challenges of the modern university – ranging from free speech to diversity issues to questions of constructing a coherent curriculum.

Ramphele addresses the obstacles hampering African universities from playing their needed role in national development, particularly challenges stemming from the unfinished agenda of national reforms and emergence of globalization. This work examines pervading issues of higher education within the context of HIV/AIDS pandemic and massive brain drain. Using OECD countries for comparison, it presents demographic, migration, health, and educational analysis for Africa. The paper underscores the presence of substantial differences between countries with respect to incomes, education systems, political institutions, and, in a more dynamic sense, economic performance over time. It also argues that we are undergoing an integration process (through globalization) which is critically based on knowledge. It warns that developing countries are falling behind industrialized ones in terms of low enrollments, low quality of education output, and low retention of qualified persons.

Kraak traces the influence of a body of international literature on the development of post-apartheid policies in South African higher education and training (HET), focusing on the emergence of a new mode of knowledge production and its impact on HET. Questions of equity and economic development (and their interrelationship) are key themes implicit in the analysis.

Since Kenyan independence in 1963, the higher education sector has expanded rapidly. Despite this expansion, as a developing country, Kenya has not been able to produce skilled personnel in the quantity and quality to develop its economy.  Gravenir explores the issue of higher education's inability to produce the type of workforce needed for Kenya to develop.

As societies internationalize, the demand for, and the value of, various goods and services increase. Individuals who possess new ideas, technologies and information that abets globalization become imbued with “transnational human capital,” making them more valuable to these societies. The authors look at this issue from five perspectives. First, they show that China's education and employment system is now highly internationalized. Secondly, since even Chinese scholars sent by the government rely heavily on foreign funds to complete their studies, China is benefiting from foreign capital invested in the cohort of returnees. Thirdly, they show that foreign PhDs are worth more than domestic PhDs in terms of perception, technology transfer, and in their ability to bring benefits to their universities. Finally, returnees in high tech zones, compared to people in the zones who had not been overseas, were more likely to be importing technology and capital, to feel that their skills were in great demand within society, and to be using that technology to target the domestic market.

The authors challenge the conventional explanation of the role of the state in skill formation in the high performing Asian economies as advocated by World Bank economists. They do this through an examination of the institutions which supported beneficial strategic state intervention in the process of skill formation in Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea. These enabled governments to produce a pace of skill formation so high that it achieved within the space of one generation something that took the advanced industrial countries three generations to achieve. Our research has identified a set of government strategies and associated institutional structures in the field of education and training in these economies which, it is argued, played a crucial role in ensuring that economic growth could proceed without employers experiencing severe skill shortages.

Using data covering the last half of the twentieth century, Bound and Turner find strong evidence that large college cohorts within the United States have relatively low undergraduate degree attainment, reflecting less than perfect elasticity of supply in the higher education market. That large cohorts receive lower public subsidies per student in higher education explains this result, indicating that resources have large effects on degree production. The results suggest that reduced resources per student following from rising cohort size and lower state expenditures are likely to have significant negative effects on the supply of colleged-educated workers entering the labor market.