private universities

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Compare and Contrast

Byuclafaculty

The LA Business Journal regularly runs lists of top firms in LA County by various criteria and sectors. It also has a listing in this week’s issue of colleges and universities ranked by enrollment. UCLA is the largest campus in the County with over 40,000 students; USC is the second largest. With the talk around about privatization, it might be of interest to contrast UCLA (public) with USC (private), using the data from the Journal. The biggest contrast is that USC has more faculty, full time and part time, than UCLA, although fewer students. On the other hand, UCLA has…

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Wrong Direction

Byuclafaculty

In yesterday’s LA Times, Patt Morrison interviewed former UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale. Most of the interview dealt with other matters. But below is an excerpt on UC:What do you make of what’s happening to the University of California? We had this great public university, but you didn’t have to insert the word “public.” [It was] able to compete with the best of the privates. We’re losing that. We may already have lost it, in large measure. Students now pay more in tuition fees than the state provides. The resource gap is too great. It’s not as if all the fine…

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Yudof on Budget, Privatization, Pensions

Byuclafaculty

There is an interview in the LA Times today (1-15-11) of President Yudof by Patt Morrison. Below are excerpts. …Morrison: You’ve used the Ed Koch line, “How’m I doing?” After 2 ½ years, how’re you doing? Yudof: I think we’re doing well, and I don’t mean to be Pollyanna-ish. We have a $20-billion shortfall, long run, in the pension plan. I think it’s going to take 20 years to dig our way out, but we have a plan. We put the new [student] eligibility standard into effect; it’s going to be a less mechanical admission [process], looking at the whole…

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Competition with the Private Universities & Endowments

Byuclafaculty

A recent working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that private universities react asymmetrically to shocks to their endowments. In particular, they overreact to negative shocks by cutting their operating budgets. That may suggest that, in the aftermath of their recent big financial losses, the privates were not as aggressive in raiding UC as they could have been but also that this effect is likely to wear off. That is, the endowment-loss effect may have shielded UC for a time, but we cannot count on it continuing. Below is a summary of the paper: Why I Lost…