Americans have complained for years that colleges and universities have put profits over people. But this country has never robustly funded its colleges and universities. Campuses have always had to hustle to limit expenses while aggressively competing for donations, business contracts, federal grants, state allocations, and students willing and able to pay tuition. All those different sources of revenue have made campus finances something like a black box, no matter a school’s status as for-profit, non-profit, private, or public. Even the country’s premiere public research universities had to aggressively fundraise and cut costs to be able to rapidly expand. They relied on business support, which focused on the science and engineering departments that Congress also prioritized at the expense of guaranteeing Americans equal, affordable opportunities to learn. College costs soared in and after the 1970s, when government support for higher education declined. State university leaders kept hustling to raise revenue and limit expenses but they faced potent opposition. Students, faculty, and neighboring communities expected universities to be more democratic places to live, work, and study. Those demands clashed with taxpayers, politicians, and donors more attuned to what colleges and universities could do for business.

Advanced Praise

"We all know that universities are expensive to attend. But how do they pay their own bills? Elizabeth Tandy Shermer has produced our first sophisticated history of the often ingenious--and, always, insufficient--ways that American higher education funded itself. Relying on an unstable mix of private and public sources, universities became vulnerable to the whims of corporate capital and predatory politicians. Anyone who wants to understand our contemporary higher-education crisis will have to read Shermer's careful account of its historical roots."—Jonathan Zimmerman, University of Pennsylvania

"The Business of Education is a sweeping, provocative reframing of the history of modern American higher education financing. Shermer pushes back against familiar narratives of the privatized and corporatized ‘neoliberal university,’ to argue that, for most institutions outside of the well-funded elite, a golden age of robust and predicable finances never happened."—Margaret O’Mara, University of Washington

"American higher education has always been a peculiar business: a can’t-make-it-up mix of entrepreneurial opportunism, public service, real estate speculation, utopian visions and ambulance chasing. Shermer’s latest title nails this complexity and clarifies it with scholarly acumen and no little wit. Here at last is the long-arc account of postsecondary finance we need to think soberly about the nation’s current predicament about college costs."—Mitchell Stevens, Stanford University