Privatization and Public Universities (review)

This edited volume covers a range of topics related to privatization and commercialization—tuition increases, patents and royalties, philanthropy, auxiliary and business function, enterprise systems, and e-learning. The authors do not engage in new research on these topics. For the most part, they draw on previous work, in many cases work they themselves have done, as is the case with the contributions by Heller, St. John, Powers, Hossler, and Farmer. The strength of the book is bringing these articles together in a single volume that tries to frame the topics in terms of making policy that serves the public good.

The editors define

privatization in public higher education as the process of transforming low-tuition institutions that are largely dependent on state funding to provide mass enrollment opportunities at low prices into institutions dependent on tuition revenues and other types of income as central sources of operating revenue. In contrast, commercialization refers to the process of transforming institutions' teaching, research, and service activities to compete with private enterprises in the larger economic marketplace.

(p. 2)

Their definition of the public good is less succinct, but it turns on providing access to higher education for all qualified students, with a preferential option for the prepared, low-income student. As they note, in the past two decades access has been expanded, state tax payers' dollars have been saved, but equity has suffered, in that hundreds of thousands of qualified low-income students have not matriculated or, if they do gain access to higher education, have not completed at the same rates as other students.

The editors suggest that we can best serve the public good by addressing the inequities that have arisen because of our increasingly privatized and commercialized system of financing postsecondary education. They propose: (a) doubling the size of the Pell grants; (b) expanding state-federal partnerships in second-tier grant programs; (c) shifting away from state funding formulae based on funds per number of students to coordinated finance strategies that take into account student aid, grants, and subsidies to colleges; and (d) implementing internal reforms such as responsibility-centered budgeting that may promote both unit accountability and creativity.

Although the volume's opening and closing chapters seek to reassert the public good in higher education in terms of expanding access through increased state and federal funding for underserved students, most of them describe how alternative revenues are raised. In other words, the book combines the standard social justice approach with its series of (almost) "how to" chapters on privatization and commercialization. Several contributors acknowledge that expanding revenue from sales, student tuition, patents and royalties, sports, and advancement are costly in and of themselves and are unlikely to help finance either instructional costs or tuition reduction; nevertheless, they suggest that the careful generation of alternative revenues may serve us well.

Cautionary notes (e.g., patents and licenses are best sought by experienced universities) do not address the issue of which students are likely to benefit from increasing efforts to generate royalties. Obviously, the most likely beneficiaries are students in sciences and engineering, not members of groups traditionally underserved in the United States.

Despite their cautious optimism about alternative revenue sources as a means of defraying institutional costs, the contributors by and large do not explore in detail how expanding various alternative revenue sources will benefit the underserved. Perhaps the reason for this omission is that, for the most part, they treat all higher education as the same, ignoring systematic distinctions (other than between public and private) among and within sectors.

This emphasis on generic higher education begs the question of access to what. For example, in this volume, community colleges, mentioned once or twice, are not treated as a distinct sector in which the majority of low-income and students of color are enrolled, nor is the low rate of community college completion addressed. If the authors were concerned with outcomes rather than access, they would have to raise questions...