Privatization of Public Universities?

I’ve long wondered when some of our major public universities would cut their ties with the state and become “private.” Michigan, Virginia, Colorado, Vermont, and a few others appear pretty close to that line already, and with the current budget downturn, that trend will likely continue. The University of Michigan, for example, gets only 7% of its revenue from the state, and Vermont gets over 70% of its revenue from tuition. If this lottery initiative results in our share of revenue from the state going up significantly, how much different would we look from those schools in terms of our revenue percentages? Not much.

And what does that mean for JBU’s future direction? My first reaction is that UofA will more and more become our main competitor. Already, our main competition at the undergraduate level is the UofA and its Honors College. At the graduate level, it’s also the UofA and its increasingly flexible programs, such as the low-residency MBA that I was in. As Pat’s been warning, how much longer before the UofA follows this graduate trajectory into flexible models for other adult students (i.e. our Advance students)?

This possible scenario furthers my convictions that we should be much more explicit in our various materials about how we compare to the UofA and also that we may need to adopt more of their pricing models (keep tuition low and charge more in fees) in order to make that comparison even more discernible. Just my two cents.

http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i34/34a01601.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en