So Georgia is picking off top Alabama scientists. Georgia leaders are touting a high “return on investment” in the form of government research contracts. Naturally, AL legislators say this means that the state of Alabama has to spend more on basic science. To say nothing of the “broken window” problems associated with this line of reasoning, it isn’t altogether clear that Alabama’s path to prosperity is by investing in high-tech science.
First, Alabama’s higher education system is mind-bogglingly inefficient. Replication of services abounds: there are 16 4-year state universities, each with their own administration, each one fighting the others for room at the government trough. There are 3 public universities in Montgomery, a city of about 250,000. There are two in Huntsville, and there are four total on the one-hour stretch of highway 72 between Florence and Huntsville. The state is dotted with community colleges. And so on.
It’s unlikely that the state will relinquish control of the university system. Until they do, though, some consolidation may be in order: putting Auburn-Montgomery, Troy State-Montgomery, and Alabama State under the same umbrella would economize on state resources, and creating a two- or three-tiered system along the lines of the California system would save even more money. Also, it is hardly clear that spending state money on science is the way to go.
Terence Kealey’s brilliant The Economic Laws of Scientific Resarch shows that state funding of basic science doesn’t generate all the rewards we usually think it does.
