Former university leaders raise flag over funding

The system for funding American flagship public universities is “gradually breaking down”, said Robert J Birgeneau, a former chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, and the co-chair of a two-year project to examine the role of public research universities and recommend changes to help them stay competitive, writes Mikhail Zinshteyn for The Hechinger Report.

With states’ investment in public universities having sharply declined since 2000, Birgeneau and Mary Sue Coleman, a former president of the University of Michigan, urged the adoption of new funding methods that rely less on tuition revenue and more on a combination of private, federal and state resources.

The recommendations came on 7 April, in the last of five reports by the group that Birgeneau and Coleman co-chaired, called The Lincoln Project: Excellence and access in public higher education, an initiative of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The report recommended that states reverse the deep cuts to their higher education budgets and, together with the federal government, create tax incentives for businesses to encourage donations to scholarships. 
Full report on The Hechinger Report site