“Like compulsive Las Vegas gamblers, many university presidents like to make big bets hoping for large payoffs. And like most gamblers, they usually lose,” writes Dr. Richard Vedder in a Dec. 2 Fiscal Times column. Vedder is Director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity and Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University’s College of Arts & Sciences.
My school is one of the few lucky ones that actually have made some money, ranking fourth in a 2008 Forbes survey on “return on investment” in research, by virtue of researcher John Kopchick’s discovery of the human growth hormone drug Somavert.
But Ohio University is atypical. In a new study for the Brookings Institution, Walter D. Valdivia confirms what I long have suspected: most technology transfer offices (TTOs) lose money. His estimate based on a survey of 155 universities for 2012 is that 130 lost money:-84 percent. “What is more, …2012 was a good year because over the last 20 years, on average, 87 percent did not break even.”
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