Mission and Money: Understanding the University

Burton A. Weisbrod · Jeffrey P. Ballou · Evelyn D. Asch

Sep 2008 · Cambridge University Press

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Mission and Money goes beyond the common focus on elite universities and examines the entire higher education industry, including the rapidly growing for-profit schools. The sector includes research universities, four-year colleges, two-year schools, and non-degree-granting career academies. Many institutions pursue mission-related activities that are often unprofitable and engage in profitable revenue raising activities to finance them. This book contains a good deal of original research on schools' revenue sources from tuition, donations, research, patents, endowments, and other activities. It considers lobbying, distance education, and the world market, as well as advertising, branding, and reputation. The pursuit of revenue, while essential to achieve the mission of higher learning, is sometimes in conflict with that mission itself. The tension between mission and money is also highlighted in the chapter on the profitability of intercollegiate athletics. The concluding chapter investigates implications of the analysis for public policy.

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Burton A. Weisbrod is John Evans Professor of Economics and Faculty Fellow of the Institute of Policy Research at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois. His publications include 15 authored, coauthored, or edited books, including the landmark study The Nonprofit Economy (1987) and To Profit or Not to Profit: The Commercial Transformation of the Nonprofit Sector (Cambridge University Press, 1998), as well as nearly 200 articles in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management. Professor Weisbrod is an elected Member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences as well as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he is a former elected member of the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association. A former Guggenheim Foundation and Ford Foundation Fellow, and senior staff member of the US Council of Economic Advisers, he recently completed terms as a member of the National Advisory Research Resources Council of the National Institutes of Health and as Chair of the Social Science Research Council Committee on Philanthropy and the Nonprofit Sector. Professor Weisbrod has received the Lifetime Research Achievement Award of the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Associations and the American Public Health Association's Carl Taube Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Mental Health Services Research. He is included in biographical listings such as Who's Who in Economics and Who's Who in Science.

Jeffrey P. Ballou is an economist at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Prior to joining Mathematica, he held faculty positions at Northeastern and Northwestern Universities. Dr Ballou's professional research spans multiple industries, including higher education and health care, areas in which he consults regularly for policy makers and institutional stakeholders. He received his PhD from Northwestern University.

Evelyn D. Asch is Research Coordinator at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University. She has also taught research and writing in the humanities and social sciences at Loyola University Chicago, DePaul University, and Shimer College. Dr Asch is the author (with Sharon K. Walsh) of three college texts in the Wadsworth Casebook in Argument series: Just War (2004), Civil Disobedience (2005), and Immigration (2005). She received her PhD from the Committee on the History of Culture of the University of Chicago.