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U.S. public colleges scramble for more funding
By J. Linn Allen/Chicago Tribune
With its double-digit tuition increases, the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign is just one of the nation's flagship state schools responding to economic and academic pressures that are forcing them to act more like private universities.
Students at the top public universities will be asked to pay a higher share of the cost of their education, and alumni and other donors will be more aggressively courted for generous gifts, university presidents and other leaders say.
They state that over the last generation, state tax revenue has made up a steadily declining share of university budgets and that isn't likely to change, regardless of fluctuations that occur in the economy.
"Tuition will keep going up, and places where it doesn't go up are at risk over long periods of time," said University of Minnesota President Mark Yudof, a leader in stressing the shift away from public financing.
The new tuition burden is likely to fall hardest on middle-income students and their families. In Illinois and elsewhere, administrators are trying to shield lower-income students by increasing financial aid the same amount as tuition goes up - similar to what happens at high-priced private universities.
For students who aren't needy enough to qualify for aid but still have a hard time footing the full bill for a college education, student loans are the likely recourse. Nationally, 60 percent of bachelor's degree recipients graduate with student loan debt reaching a median of $15,375 at public institutions.
To some, administrators' complaints about state support seem like the same old breast-beating. Pat Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said universities have "insatiable appetites" for money that can't be dealt with just by feeding them more.
"Costs keep going up astronomically. We can continue to pass the costs along to students until there is a significant backlash," Callan said. "You're playing with political dynamite if you push this too far."
But Yudof and other leaders respond that the value of a degree at a top university is recognized to be worth so much in lifetime earnings that students see the reason for paying more.
"The ideology has moved to a market ideology," Yudof said.
U. of I. President James Stukel said that for most students and their families, quality is the main issue.
Administrators at Big Ten universities argue that even with recently escalating tuition increases - such as the 42 percent over two years at Urbana-Champaign for new students under the latest proposal - the top state schools are still a great bargain, compared with the private institutions they consider their peers. (The new freshman tuition at Urbana-Champaign would be $5,302, in contrast to around $26,000 at Northwestern University.)
Perhaps the key money issue for public university administrators is a drastically widening discrepancy in faculty salaries between the major public research institutions and their private counterparts. For full professors, that gap has risen from $1,400 in 1980 to $22,100 last year, according to an analysis by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
That means the top professors get hired away, making the universities less competitive for the best graduate students and the big research grants, administrators say.
The shift to thinking along private school lines began in the early 1990s when public university administrators realized the salary gap was surging over 20 percent, Stukel said. To avoid falling even further behind, money was reallocated from other areas, he said.
"We had to cannibalize to do it, and having gone through that experience once and learned what sort of devastation it caused, I don't think it's worth it," Stukel said.
During that period some public universities also began to step up drives to raise cash from alumni, which previously had been a minor source of funds. David Ward, president of the American Council on Education and former University of Wisconsin chancellor, said gifts at Wisconsin went from $20 million in 1988 to $180 million in 2000.
Ward said the trend toward private funding had already become so pronounced by the mid-1990s that he suggested to the governor's office - mostly theoretically - that perhaps the Madison campus might go private altogether.
Ward said he doesn't seriously believe any of the state flagship universities are likely to go completely private because the states could never consider abandoning such large and valuable assets.
But he and others see a sort of public-private partnership. In a magazine article that hasn't been published yet, Minnesota's Yudof envisions a "hybrid university, an institution with many traditions and functions still within the public realm, but with other characteristics more in line with those of private colleges and universities."
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