Financing of Private Colleges

Report Outline
Money Troubles of Private Colleges
Inadequacy of Higher Education Funding
Pressure for Greater Federal Support

Money Troubles of Private Colleges

Threat to Identity of the Independent College

A financial bind in the private sector of higher education in the United States threatens to narrow the traditional distinctions between the private and the public colleges and universities, and perhaps to eliminate entirely many of the privately supported independent institutions. There is wide agreement that such an eventuality would constitute a tragic loss of diversity and imaginative enterprise in American education. Leading educational authorities believe that grants from public funds to help meet operating costs hold the only hope for survival of more than a handful of non-public colleges and universities.

Almost all major national organizations in the higher education field have taken action over the past year to impress on public opinion—and on political leaders—what they consider an acute need for increased government funding of the general expenses of higher education, public and private alike. Representatives of seven national associations of colleges and universities issued on Nov. 12 the latest of a series of calls for new federal grants to institutions of higher education to avoid “an impending disaster.”

But there are some who worry: If the federal government or state governments were to come to the rescue of foundering private institutions, how private could they remain? Alan Pifer, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, foresees a day when privately financed colleges and universities may well disappear from sight as a result of ever-mounting federal aid. He would not be surprised if, by the year 2000, the federal government, which now finances around one-fourth of the country's higher education budget, had come to foot virtually the entire bill—thus in effect turning the private colleges into the equivalent of public institutions. Future blurring of differences between the state and municipal universities and privately administered colleges is expected also by Allan M. Cartter, chancellor of New York University and director of the American Council on Education's Commission on Plans and Objectives for Higher Education.