Financing Public and Private Higher Education Higher Essay

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Financing Public and Private Higher Education

Higher education in the United States consists of varieties of institutions that award degree certificates, associate certificates, and postgraduates' certificates. Data presented by National Center for Education Statistics (2011) reveal that there are approximately total number of 4,495 degree and non-degree granting institutions in the United States where 2,774 grant 4-year and postgraduate degrees and 1,721 higher institutions grant associate degrees. As being revealed in Table 1, there are 1000 public higher institutions granting 2-year associate degrees while 721 are private higher institutions granting associate degree. On the other hand, there are total number of 2,102 private higher institutions that grant 4-year and postgraduate degree certificates where 672 are public higher institutions that grant 4-year and postgraduate degree certificates.

Table1: Total Number of Private and Public Higher Education in the United States

4-YEAR INSTITUTIONS

Public

Private

2-YEAR INSTITUTIONS

Public

Private

TOTAL NUMBER OF HIGHER INSTITUTIONS

Source: National Center for Education Statistics. (2011).

Mainstay of the higher educations in the United States is the private and public funding. Both public and private higher educations rely on different sources of funding to remain in operations. These institutions use this finance to pay tutors' salaries and run day-to-day administrations.

Fundamental objective of this paper is to investigate the funding sources of higher education in the United States with special emphasis of the University of California, Berkeley (public), and Princeton University (private).

The paper discusses the complexity facing public and private higher education in the United States.

Complexity of Finance in Higher Education

U.S higher education has faced a significant sharp drop in funding from the states within the last two decades. For several decades, states were the principal source of finance for public higher institutions. However, since 1990s, there has been a gradual decline of the proportion of revenues from the states making many public higher educations to increase the tuition and fees. Generally, there has been a 10% decline of state expenditure on many public higher institutions.

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Despite the decline in the funding from the state, there has been a general increase in the college and university expenditures, which include academic support and services for students. (Geiger & Heller 2011).

University of California, Berkeley is one of the largest public funded universities in the state of California. The recession that swept across the United States in 2008 affected the university leading to the severe budget cuts without long-term strategic plan, which makes the University of California to be slowly starved of state public funding. (Douglass, 2010).

Kane, & Orszag, (2005) argue that there has been a general decline of government funding and the decline in the states' funding was from $62.8 billion to $60.2 billion between 2002 and 2004. The big challenge facing higher education is due to the increase in inflation leading to the increase on the expenditure per student. The state funding per student at University of California, Berkeley has declined steadily while student's enrollment in the university has increased due to the growth of Californian population.

Between 2000 and 2008, there was an increase in the student enrollment in the higher education with 2.8% growth in annual rate of enrollment. The increase in the enrollment has been generally due to the increase in the U.S. population. By 2008, the student enrollment increased by 47%. Concurrent increase in the enrollment has led to the increase in the tuitions fees within the higher educations making higher institutions to become more expensive for many households. Despite the increase in the student enrollment in the United States, expenditure per student in public state institutions has increased in the last 10 years. Thus, higher institutions have devised several strategies to source for both private and government funding......

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