Private Parts

My first blog post on University and State!

I want to extend a discussion from my blog, the Critical Badger, to this website. Today, I wrote about the need for Wisconsin to follow Michigan and other successful public schools by improving its private fundraising operation.

I found this blurb from a UW-Madison website to be especially telling in Wisconsin’s growing inability to compete given our problematic relationship with the state.

As many of our U&S contributors now attend private schools, the public v. private divide is especially useful to observe:

The major difference in the fate of public and private universities, however, is accounted for by the growth in unrestricted annual gifts and unrestricted endowments over the last 15 years relative to the growth in state funding for public higher education. The growth rate in wealth and the return on invested endowments over this period has simply dwarfed the growth in state funding for public higher education.

As a result, base budgets have grown far faster at private universities than at public universities. This has their leaders brimming with confidence. It should also have sensible people who appreciate the role public universities play in creating a ladder of opportunity in society very worried. Concentrating a greater share of the resources dedicated to higher education on a smaller fraction of students will, in my view, have harmful long-term impacts on the economy and society.

Wisconsin must not be complacent. Time to fundraise, people.

-CB