Higher Education Finance

This paper is a description and analysis of the history of the renovation of Memorial Stadium and the building of the Barclay Simpson Student Athlete High Performance Center (SAHPC) on the Berkeley campus, showing how incremental changes over time result in a much riskier and financially less viable project than originally anticipated. It describes the decision making process, the role of various constituent groups including senior administrators and the UC Regents, faculty, community members and local and state governmental officials, donors and protesters. It includes the legal...

Beginning in earnest in the 1950s, most state governments began a process of creating public university systems with a governing board and intended to coordinate and manage usually a range of institutional types and including a major public flagship university. By the late 1980s, enthusiasm for more centralized structures and state-wide “superboards” began to wane, in part because of the opposition of flagship campuses fearful of the “leveling” result they had seen in Wisconsin. The two decades after 1990 were marked both by austerity and limited growth and...

President Barack Obama recently announced a proposal to eliminate tuition charges at community colleges so that everyone can easily complete the first two years of a university education. At the same time, the administration is creating new regulations to curb the worst abuses of for-profit universities. This suggests that the country has reached a turning point regarding access to higher education. There is a practical limit to privatization, and the countries that have privatized their higher education systems most aggressively, such is the case of the United States, are now...

The United States has been the leader in fundamental research for the last seven decades. Fundamental research is overwhelming undertaken in or in conjunction with research-intensive universities, and since the 1950s they have depended on US Federal funding to make this possible. This support has been consistently championed by Congress, is popular across the political spectrum and enjoys long public backing, in no small part because there remains a widespread trust in the societal benefits it provides. Yet the US now faces a dilemma over the future of this national achievement and the...