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This note looks at the Digital Divide in
terms of the disparity between the number of patents obtained by HBCUs
and the number obtained by some of the nation's most prestigious majority
colleges and universities. While no one will be surprised to learn that
the very best majority schools have earned more patents than HBCUs,
the size of the difference turns out to be far more than might be expected.
- While
reviewing the number of patents assigned to HBCUs, the DLL did not
find any HBCU that had obtained more than 26 patents since 1976. However,
as can be seen from Table
A (Part II), the most successful single university in
the majority group, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.),
obtained more than 2700 patents since 1976, i.e., more than 100 times
as many patents as any single HBCU.
- Hypothetically, patents might provide
a rough measure of the technical creativity of an institition of higher
learning. However, the size of this difference -- two orders of magnitude
-- is so astounding that the DLL immediately rejects this hypothesis
in favor of two alternatives.
- A quick scan of the current endowments
of the majority institutions recorded in column 3 of Table
A confirms what everyone already knows
==> Each of the majority schools is a lot richer than any HBCU.
However this explanation is very "uninteresting" because
there is nothing that HBCUs can do about it. M.I.T has an endowment
worth almost $7 billion and Harvard has an endowment worth more than
$25 billion. So what.
More significantly, Table
A suggests that money may not be the most important factor
anyway. If it was, then the fact that Carnegie Mellon University earned
1669 patents with an endowment of $837 million would lead one to expect
that Harvard University, having an endowment of over $25 billion,
would have earned more than 25 times as many patents as Carnegie Mellon;
but it didn't. Harvard only earned 677 patents -- not even half as
many as Carnegie Mellon.
Even more surprising is the fact that within every adjacent pair of
schools in this table, the school with less money earned more patents
per endowment dollar than the richer school in the pair. For example,
the California system with a $5,222 billion endowment earned almost
twice as many patents as M.I.T., even though M.I.T.'s endowment was
somewhat larger. Another example, Cal Tech earned 1520 patents vs.
Stanford's 1320 patents, even though Cal Tech's endowment was slighly
more than $1 billion vs. Stanford's much larger $12 billion endowment.
- The DLL's second explanation of the patent gap between
the HBCUs and the top majority institutions is more actionable. Informed
that someone was twice as good at something as he was, the author
of this note might shrug. Informed that the other person was ten times
as good as he was, the author would be embarrassed. However, informed
that the other person was over 100 times as good, the author would
be certain that he was being handed scores for a game that he wasn't
even playing, that he wasn't even on the court yet, that he was probably
somewhere out in the parking lot!!
The point of this note is that the patent game is a
very important game that most HBCUs haven't begun to play yet. We need
to come in from the parking lots and get out on the courts. ... :-)
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