We know there is a crisis in higher education. We see the symptoms in higher tuition, lower graduation rates, and record student loan debt. Too often, the narrative about what’s causing these problems is the idea that these universities just aren’t being run similarly enough to private businesses. Is this true, though? We’ve been cutting funding and pushing privatization on our public universities for 30 years now. What are the results?
The University of Cincinnati (UC) is Ohio’s second-largest four-year public university, withan enrollment of 46,388 in 2019. It hasan annual budget of more than $1 billion per year and an endowment of $1.38 billion, ranking it 77th of 818 institutions in the United States and Canada. The school just completeda new $120 million building for its business school.
Recently, a coalition of university students launched a project that looks at the ways in which the University of Cincinnati is being run like a private university. Called “Boldly Bankrupt” (a play on UC’s Boldly Bearcat marketing campaign), the coalition shows who’s benefiting (management, administrators, athletics programs) and who is being hurt most by these practices (students and faculty).