- Are you Wyoming? If yes, double or triple your population before proceeding to step 2.
- Create a set of colleges, N>1, within a state.
- Arrange them hierarchically according to their selectivity, using the principal of a pyramid. A typical model would include one flagship, two doctoral-granting universities, at least three or four regional universities and an undergraduate-only college or two, and easily ten community colleges.
- Correlate funding inversely with acceptance rate. In other words, the flagships should get the most money per student.
- Notice that the bottom of the pyramid is having trouble doing more with less.
- Exacerbate the funding inequality further to punish them. Call it "performance funding."
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
The public higher education funding model
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2 comments:
Do you think this is because the well funded universities tend to be research institutions while the underfunded are teaching institutions?
I wasn't ignoring this, just thinking about it, and I'm not sure I have a good answer. There's something to that, but it's hard to tease out how much because of the way universities developed in the U.S. The well-funded flagship institutions are also the oldest and (for the most part) existed before there was such a thing as a "research university." So they had age and prestige before it became research-vs.-teaching. To the extent any of the teaching-intensive schools are old, they are formal normal schools - they weren't universities, nor did they offer a college degree - so they didn't become universities until after that distinction began to matter. And many, including all the community colleges, are much younger. It's worth noting that there are very elite, well-off private sector teaching-focused institutions.
In short, prestige correlates with age as much as mission.
The other factor I've seen mentioned is the legislators tend to be products of the flagships themselves.
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