How US colleges and universities aggressively hustle to limit expenses while also competing for public and private revenue sources

How new is the higher education hustle? Americans have complained for years that colleges and universities have put profits over people. In The Business of Education, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer shows that campuses have always had to hustle to limit expenses while aggressively competing for donations, business contracts, federal grants, state allocations, and students willing to pay tuition. All those different sources of revenue have made campus finances something of a black box, no matter a school’s status as for-profit, non-profit, private, or public.

Rather than looking at well-studied, elite universities, Shermer instead traces the history of US higher education finance by investigating five campuses from across the country that gradually became leading public research universities. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Michigan State University, Arizona State University, and the University of California San Diego are part of state systems that annually teach thousands more students than Ivy League schools. Shermer argues that these campuses, taken together, demonstrate that even the country’s premier public research universities had to aggressively fundraise and cut costs to be able to rapidly expand. Even during the heyday of government financing, they relied on business support, which focused on the science and engineering departments that Congress also prioritized. Over time, students, faculty, and neighboring communities expected universities to be more democratic places to live, work, and study, yet those demands clashed with university administrators, taxpayers, politicians, and donors who were more attuned to what colleges and universities could do for business.

The Business of Education’s examination of the higher education hustle reveals how US colleges’ and universities’ historic reliance on chaotic, uncertain funding reflects changing and sometimes contradictory political, economic, social, and cultural norms that have shifted expectations for what it means to be equal, accessible, and democratic.