What Wouldn't We Do for Revenue?

This thoroughly researched and highly engaging book adds to a growing body of scholarly works on higher education that address the impact of changing sources of revenue on university mission and practice. Slaughter and Leslie's Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies and the Entrepreneurial University (1997), Simon Marginson's Markets in Education (1997), Ron Ehrenberg's Tuition Rising: Why College Costs so Much (2000), David Kirp's Shakespeare, Einstein and the Bottom Line: The Marketing of Higher Education (2003), Derek Bok's Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education (2003), Roger Geiger's Knowledge and Money: Research Universities and the Paradox of the Marketplace (2004), and Engell and Dangerfield's Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005), have all been published in just over a decade. These, of course, follow in a historical tradition of works that have wrestled with higher education and commerce, such as Veblen's The Higher Learning: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men (1918) and Robert Maynard Hutchins's The Higher Learning in America (1936). Thus, on the one hand, it is high praise to say that this book stands out from the crowd in its detailed and well-documented coverage of the challenges contemporary universities face in financing mission-related activities. On the other hand, we should probably begin to move our research and scholarship beyond money, which has served as an un-deconstructed proxy for a very long time, and begin, as the authors of this volume advise near its conclusion, "confronting the fundamental tension in higher education." They suggest, as their title would have it, that the tension is between mission and money, much the same challenge that Veblen and Hutchins addressed decades ago. This may mean that over the past seventy years mission versus money has proven itself an exceptionally intractable intellectual dilemma in higher education, one that has become particularly problematic (and book worthy) of late. It may also be that we aren't asking the right questions.

This book is at its best when it marshals a wide array of data to document changes in the degree and kinds of revenue flowing into colleges and universities of various types. It offers useful insight into the ways in which revenue demands shape such complex arenas as tuition setting, endowments, development, patent licensing, the distinctions between public, nonprofit and for-profit institutions, and intercollegiate athletics. While much of this ground has been traversed before, the quality of the work here is such that readers will find some new revelation in every one of these areas.

The essential conceptual lens used throughout the work is what the authors call the "two-good framework," an approach that reduces university activity to two forms of behavior, "mission goods" and "revenue goods." That is, efforts to meet university goals, and those endeavors in which universities engage to pay for efforts to meet their goals. The elegant simplicity of the framework, and the orderly approach to applying it to various university functions make this an ideal text for courses on postsecondary finance, planning, and organization.

Perhaps the least satisfying aspect of the book is that while it develops excellent data on shifts in resource allocation, those changes are not presented within a clearly articulated theoretical or conceptual model. The "two-good" perspective serves as an organizing principle rather than an explanatory frame. While economic theory is often invoked to describe revenue-maximizing efforts, it is not the work's animating force either. Although the authors do not invoke the concept, the overarching argument here would generally be linked to a resource dependence model (Pfeffer & Salancik, 1978), an institutional perspective that is only mildly helpful for understanding university mission. Resource dependence suggests that institutions position themselves close to key sources of revenue and legitimacy in order to persist. But knowing that people need to eat in order to live doesn't tell you much about what they choose for sustenance, or...