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As a prominent social scientist recently noted, "The political clamor to take care of our needs now makes investment in the future very difficult. Higher education is an investment in the future. A society can spend all its resources on alleviating poverty and traffic congestion, in resolving the human problems of today, and invest nothing in the future. It goes back to the what-has-posterity-ever-done-for-me philosophy."
Ironically, this reluctance to look ahead is coinciding with a contradictory international trend. China, Korea, Ireland and a host of other developing countries are investing more money than ever in higher education as the logical means to ratchet up their global competitiveness.

When Abraham Lincoln signed the federal act that created this country's land grant university system, he had a vision. He foresaw a country where the children of farmers and clerks would have an equal right to the higher education that was a birth right reserved for the privileged few. Lincoln's bequest to the nation grew with the passage of the GI Bill, America's IOU check to the generation of young men and women who helped defeat the Nazis, and with the insistence of the civil rights movement that America live up to the promise of its constitution. No other country until recent years has matched this democratization of higher education.

The social compact may have been unspoken, but the terms seemed clear - in return for taxpayer support, land grant universities like Utah State would become the people's educational institutions - affordable and responsive to the needs of their states and communities. It was Utah State and her peers that would step up to the plate when the nation needed cleaner water, safer food supplies, and more engineers and special education teachers.

What's good for the economy and the environment is good for the democracy. "The college educated are more likely to vote and to be informed when they vote, to serve on committees, to run for office," says Albrecht.

But as an unprecedented number of students turned to higher education as their entryway into a middle-class lifestyle, federal and state funding failed to keep up with the cost. This funding gap has been particularly acute in Utah, where taxpayers support more school-age children than anywhere else in the country.

So here we are today - the inheritors of a noble experiment that is admired and emulated around the world, an experiment that we are no longer willing or able to fund.

Rather than abandoning the nobility of the mission, university presidents today are proposing a new paradigm for public higher education. Former Utah State President Kermit L. Hall explains, "Universities like Utah State began as state funded. Then they became state supported. Then they became state assisted. Today many of them are merely state located. If Utah State is to become a better public university, it has no choice but to act more like a private university."

In what Albrecht describes as "the biggest transformation of higher education in my lifetime," public research universities like Utah State are evolving into "a hybrid public-private enterprise. In the not-too-distant future," says Hall, "universities will function like the bridges and canals of the 19th century. They will be privately owned but operated in the public interest." By "hybrid," Hall means that as the state retreats from its commitment to higher education, the financial responsibility will fall increasingly on students (in higher tuition and fees), on alumni and friends (through gifts), and business people (in the form of partnerships). more

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