Tim Worstall

University Endowments

So the Maximum Tone thinks that we should all send money to our old universities so that they can teach the next generation:

Universities would collapse without tuition fees and must now seek to
find a third major source of income through fund-raising, Tony Blair
says today.

Business, former students and philanthropists can help provide funds to
expand higher education and ensure universities are in a position to
compete internationally, he says.

Fair enough, not a bad idea. However, two provisos before the LSE starts to get cheques from me.

1) Lift the cap on tuition fees. Let’s have a proper independent market. That’ll stop a lot of the Mickey Mouse degrees and kill some of the stupidities in the humanities courses stone dead.

2) Let’s review William Hague’s old idea of flogging off some State assets to lay the foundations of these endowments. The BBC could be first up on the block, closely followed by  Channel 4. There’s a few billion right there which would be a flying start, don’t you think.

Nominations for further sales in the comments please.

In

4 responses

  1. Kit Avatar
    Kit

    So our Tone is not going to fund higher education via tax – when do we get the tax cut?
    To answer your question – how about selling the universities? I wonder if Harvard would be interested in buying Cambridge? Eton buying Oxford?

    Reply
  2. Bruce G Charlton Avatar
    Bruce G Charlton

    My worry is that this scheme will only maintain state-dependency – I’d like to see a five year limit on govt. contributions.
    UK universities are probably one of the most state controlled of all industries – most major sources of university income are state provided – and both the number of students and their fees are set by government. Government controls infrastructure spending, the research assessment exercise and associated funding, and most of the research grants. Fees from some non-EU students offer about the only scope for increasing income.
    But surely this scheme will fail – it deserves to. Why would anyone want to contribute money to a nationalized industry who cannot control how they spend that money? I would be like writing the local council into your will.

    Reply
  3. Glenn Athey Avatar
    Glenn Athey

    I wouldn’t give a donation to any of my ex-seats of learning unless it was ring-fenced to doing research or directly funding a student or something like that. I jus think they’d fritter away the cash on something bureaucratic.
    As Bruce alludes to, I think we need to fundamentally look again at the model for higher education and research and cut the cloth to suit. Currently universities are largely unaccountable and receive huge chunks of money, oh and they are self governed by senates of academics!
    why not have an endowment fund linked purely to stuff people want to donate for – e.g. pure research, students from deprived backgrounds, etc?

    Reply
  4. David Gillies Avatar
    David Gillies

    The most important thing is breaking the link between the government and the universities. I think the best way to do this would be to simply state that universities were now completely independent of all state control/monitoring etc, and had to raise their operating costs by any means they saw fit. A one-time endowment could be parceled out by a simple bond issue in the few tens of billions of pounds.

    Reply

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