Convergence in American higher education?

After a two-day dean's conference in Conway, I'm back to pondering what appears to me to be the growing convergence, at least in terms of budget models, of public and private 4-year colleges and universities. 50 years ago, public institutions got almost all of their resources from state funding while private schools received their money from tuition and fund-raising. But now what's the situation? Our private schools, with just a few exceptions (Hillsdale, Grove), are very closely tied to government resources (student aid in particular) while public institutions are seeing government aid make up a smaller and smaller percentage of their overall budget. Tuition and fund-raising, what had been the purview of the privates, is making up a bigger and bigger share of the public school pot.

So what happens after another 50 years of these trends? At what point will some of the big state schools with big endowments decide to get out from under the state's thumb and go private? At what point will the privates get so worried about the increasing regulatory burdens that congress has been attaching to its financial aid contributions and follow the Hillsdale model? And if neither of these occur, how will publics and privates handle their increasingly direct competition with each other?

You know, maybe someone should write a book on the subject. Hmm . . . I think I need another sabbatical, maybe this time for a full year?