Higher Education Finance

$15 Billion Is Enough to Fight a President

Charlie Eaton
2025

Higher Ed's Financial Roller Coaster

Jennifer Delaney
2023

How Colleges Lost Billions to Hedge Funds in 2016

Charlie Eaton
2017

Arizona State's Success Story: Model or Mirage?

Steven Brint
2021

Why Does UC Berkeley Need $6 Billion?

John Aubrey Douglass
2020

Markets in Higher Education: Can We Still Learn From Economics' Founding Fathers?

Pedro Nuno Teixeira
2006

Markets or market-like mechanisms are playing an increasing role in higher education, with visible consequences both for the regulation of higher education systems as a whole, as well as for the governance mechanisms of individual institutions. This article traces the history of economists’ views on the role of education, from Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Alfred Marshall, and Milton Friedman, to present-day debates about the relevance of market economies to higher education policy. Recent developments in higher education policy reflect both the rising strength of market mechanisms...

The Effects of a Changing Financial Context on the University of California

Gerald R. Kissler
Ellen Switkes
2005

California’s loss of capital gains and stock options revenue during the recent economic downturn was one of the worst in the nation, and the resulting fiscal crisis led to reductions in State appropriations to the University of 15% over the past four years, while enrollments grew by 19%. This article examines the effects of this reduction in State funding and outlines the actions taken by the University of California to minimize the impact of these reductions in State funding. Despite sharp increases, student tuition and fee increases offset less than one-third of the total cut....

FROM THE GOLDEN AGE TO THE AGE OF AUSTERITY: Planning at the University of California, 1968-1983 by Patricia A. Pelfrey, UC Berkeley, CSHE 8.17 (July 2017)

Patricia A. Pelfrey
2017

A 1966 University of California academic plan estimated that future enrollments would soar to well over 200,000 before leveling off, and that by 1975 student demand would require two more UC campuses in addition to the ones opened a few years earlier at Santa Cruz, Irvine, and San Diego. The 1970 US census brought these stratospheric assumptions down to earth. Its projections of declining numbers of college-age students into the next decade and beyond, combined with the shock of unfavorable academic market and budgetary trends, became the starting point for an ambitious new UC planning...

CHANGING MISSIONS AMONG PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES IN CALIFORNIA AND NEW YORK: Application of a Concentration Equality Index by Satoshi P. Watanabe & Yasumi Abe, Hiroshima University CSHE 14.17 (November 2017)

Satoshi P. Watanabe
Yasumi Abe
2017

Capitalizing on the findings in our preceding study of a purely theoretical model, this paper aims to empirically examine whether and to what extent public universities’ institutional missions have transformed in recent years in the States of California and New York by quantifying a degree of functional diversification of universities. We focus on research funding and productivity, and public service activities, and have developed a Concentration Equality Index (CEI) to help in this analysis. We then apply the CEI over time to a selected group of public university-system campuses within...

TO GROW OR NOT TO GROW? A Post-Great Recession Synopsis of the Political, Financial, and Social Contract Challenges Facing the University of California

John Aubrey Douglass
2013

After more than two decades of state disinvestment, the University of California faces significant challenges and misunderstandings regarding its operating costs, its wide array of activities, and its mission. Reduced funding from the state for public higher education, including UC, has essentially severed the historic link between state allocations and enrollment, altering the incentive and ability for UC to expand academic programs and enrollment in pace with California’s growing population. “To grow or not to grow?,” that is the question. This macro management and major...