University ecosystem analytics: Case study of regional integration and competitiveness in California and Texas

Despite substantial policy efforts aimed at developing regional innovation
systems (RIS), our understanding of institutional factors that promote
synergy and integration at the regional scale is limited. To address this
gap, we constructed 2 representations of research university ecosystems in
California (CA) and Texas (TX) that identify institutional co-occurrences
in research and news media, within and across these regions. The selection
of these regions is attributed to the University of California and the
University of Texas, two multi-campus university systems (MUS) that
feature distinct configurations of institutional specialization. As such,
we exploit these differences to analyze four institutional assortativity
channels that foster system-level synergies: institutional proximity,
prestige, homophily, and specialization. The first representation we
constructed is based upon ~3 million publications collected from Clarivate
Analytics Web of Science Core Collection (WOS) that are affiliated with at
least one of the 28 institutions in our sample, which together represent
>5% of publications indexed by WOS over the sample period
1970-2020. The 28 institutions consist of 10 institutions belonging to the
University of California (UC) system and 12 institutions belonging to the
University of Texas (UT) system; we complement these two public
multi-campus university systems (MUS) by including six prominent private
universities, which represent a non-MUS comparison group. As universities
increasingly compete for visibility to attract student enrollment and
build scientific reputation, the management of institution of higher
education (IHE) brand has emerged as an important strategic endeavor.
Hence, the second representation we constructed is based upon ~2 million
digital news media articles published between 2000-2020 that specifically
mention at least one of these universities. Similar to the first
representation,  mapping the rates of digital media co-visibility
among IHE facilitates a systems-level understanding of the factors that
condition the structure and dynamics of brand stratification within
research university ecosystems, and fosters the development of novel
measures for two dimensions of brand equity – namely, visibility and
association.