Editorial Column—Education: Our Most Important Service Sector

Abstract

{Excerpt] Education as a service industry is crying out for serious research. Smaller service segments of the economy, like retail, banking, supply chains and logistics, have received the attention of many researchers over the past half-century. Research in the health sector has been in the tens of billions of dollars, especially in inventing new medical treatments including pharmaceuticals, but nothing analogous has occurred in education. The research arm of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE), the Institute of Education Sciences, has an annual budget of about $160 million. There are about 56 million k-12 school children in the U.S. So, the DOE research devoted to education is less than three dollars per child per year. The picture at NSF is brighter, with an annual budget of its Directorate for Education and Human Resources of approximately $750 million, including tertiary as well as k-12 education. So, there is room for optimism going forward. Still, we would wager that education is at or near the bottom of the top ten U.S. service industries in research dollars spent per percentage unit of GDP. This may be due in part to the relatively smaller private sector in educational services as compared to other services. [Service Science, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]