Scholarly works and policy discussions on higher education systems too often overlook institutions that do not claim to combine teaching and research. They give particularly little attention to institutions that focus on research and do little or no teaching. Yet such research institutions are a major and rising presence in much of the world.

One root of neglect relates to faith in the research university as the ideal type of higher education institution. The faith, often enshrined in a nation's legislation or in assistance programs by international agencies, is misplaced: the model makes sense for certain higher education circumstances and goals, but not all. In any case, this higher education form is rare, both today and historically, especially if one leaves aside the pretenders: places that claim to do research but do not (at least by any acceptable standards). Even in the United States and Germany, von Humboldt notwithstanding, the research university is only one historical form and today shares the research terrain with private industry, public research centers, and private think tanks.

In Latin America an extraordinary breakthrough in research has been concentrated outside the university. Private research centers (PRCs) have led a revolutionary surge in social and policy research. PRCs are juridically private and freestanding institutions that do not distribute profits. They usually rank high in nongovernment finance and governance. Alongside PRCs, and covering other research fields, lie a panoply of kindred international centers, public centers, centers structurally tied to larger private organizations, and centers located within universities but outside the faculties that dominate teaching.

Generally best known by their acronyms (e.g., Brazil's IUPERJ, Chile's CIEPLAN, Peru's GRADE), PRCs are often more skilled, prolific, and influential than their public university counterparts. They hold a disproportional share of the best credentials and talent, including the leading intellectuals. Beyond picking up the slack for faltering public institutions, PRCs spearhead a surge in the quantity, quality, and relevance of the region's social research. And while most PRCs do not engage in graduate education, those that do are atypically large and often provide the best quality available.

PRCs also epitomize how research institutions can be far more than academic institutions. In socioeconomic terms, PRCs are instrumental in designing and promoting development alternatives to official policies and, in other situations, in designing the official policies themselves. Some PRCs directly serve many business organizations. Many make a vital contribution in knowledge, training, information, and studies for booming nonprofit grassroots organizations, helping to build the Third Sector (nonprofit) and thereby provide development options not restricted to just the public and for-profit private sectors; in fact, many nonprofits are simultaneously PRCs and social action institutions. In their policy activities PRCs often function politically as think tanks. Furthermore, PRCs' net political impact is decidedly democratic, both in opposition to authoritarian regimes and in collaboration with their successors. Many PRCs assume a leadership role that intellectuals and university students have traditionally played in Latin America: a claim on national consciousness and identity.

The substantial success of PRCs contrasts with the emphasis on failure that characterizes much literature on comparative higher education, Third World research productivity, and philanthropy. The positive evaluation emerges as the analysis of PRCs ranges across issues of their definitional boundaries, the reasons for their growth and adaptability, the sources of finance and the control that may accompany that finance, the macropolitical questions related to PRCs under different regimes, and micropolitical questions related to intraorganizational governance. Success is qualified, however, by the fragility and dependence of most PRCs and by a series of academic weaknesses. PRCs are not adequate substitutes for good research universities; in some ways they even become obstacles to their development.

PRCs do not lead in every nation, much less in every aspect of social research, but a four-part categorization shows only two nations where PRCs clearly have less weight than universities in social research. The main categories are where the research is: (1) plentiful and mostly, or almost exclusively, packed into PRCs, (2) more limited yet impressively expanded and, again, packed mostly into PRCs, (3) developed in major part by both PRCs and universities. Attention to PRCs is attention to a vital part of higher education and provides new perspectives on the universities to which research centers have formed such attractive alternatives.