Years back, there was talk of trying to leverage this concentration, to improve national science education. Professorial educational skills are often less than wonderful. Eg, physics education research's "if you think your lectures are working, your assessment also isn't". And creating change by improving current professors is hard, expensive, and failure prone. So the idea was, to lavishly fund education research, training, and education minors, at these few institutions through which pass, most graduate students who will eventually become professors. Make their instructional training really excellent, and then wait for it to propagate nationally. One obvious downside being reinforcing the concentration.