Saturday, December 20, 2014

'Privatization and the Public Good' - Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

Put five public university administrators in a room, and chances are good that within an hour one of them will joke about the fact that his or her institution has gone from being "state supported" to "state assisted" to "state located." As funding for public higher education has shrunk (or at least failed to keep up with growing enrollments) in many states, public colleges and universities have increasingly sought other forms of funding that, over time, make them look less and less like state entities and more and more like their cousins in the private nonprofit sector. That trend toward privatization has spurred controversy in numerous states, troubled faculty members who believe their institutions may lose their public purpose, and raised serious questions about whether the future of "public" higher education is imperiled. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/12/08/does-privatizing-public-higher-education-necessarily-undermine-public-good