Higher Education Funding
This speech by Tony Blair about universities and their funding is pretty good. I'm sure he delivered it well, and that the delivery was close to the text.
He says this, towards the end of the speech:
Hence today's announcement on endowments. Private fund-raising - from alumni and business - is a major source of income in the United States. The UK does not spend much less public money on higher education than the US. But private giving there is much greater. The average US university has an endowment fourteen times that of a comparable UK university. 207 universities in the USA currently have endowments worth £100m or more. There are only 7 in the UK.
Why is this? Partly it's about cultural attitudes, but partly it's also about capacity. In the last twenty years, there has been a rapid growth in private endowments in US public universities, often as a result of matched funding from the state. And in Ontario, Canada, a match-funding scheme has greatly increased private giving in the province's 29 universities and colleges.
I think there is another problem, and that is that old members of a university fear that if they give any money to it, the funding from central government will quickly be adjusted so that the per capita spending on undergraduates is adjusted back to some standard, centrally-fixed figure. We just know that it is literally impossible to give money to an old school if it is now in the state sector. We just assume that it will be the same in the university sector.
The last time I went back to my old college the then Principal stated that things were extremely grim, even in the relatively benign environment of Oxford. This was not many years ago. There is a big gap between the picture painted by TB and the government and that painted by those who actually have to implement government policies.