Who should pay for this (1)?

 The University is centered around the three pillars of:

1.    Teaching
2.    Research
3.    Community or Social development

At the foundation of these is teaching. As custodians of knowledge, they represent the highest level of arbitration on science, arts, skills, values and culture. They pass this down to students, through structured curricula and teaching modules. 

Closely tied to, and also the foundation of all teaching is research. Universities and research institutions are the incubators of knowledge and ideas that advance societal growth and civilization. Every societal problem should be studied, theorized, investigated, documented and piped back for testing and validation in the real-world--- this is what research entails

Community or social development are not separate responsibilities per se. Rather, they represent the various channels through which the university interact with and give back to the society where they are found. It is the response of the university in using the valued knowledge and information at their disposal to serve the community.

The real question is this:

Given these monumental assignments, who becomes responsible for the financing; how should the financing be done and how should the rewards be redistributed for the benefits of the society?

Financing of universities comes from a lot of sources including the government, grants and research fundings, private equity and internally generated revenues.

My goal is to draw attention to the role of private equity in shaping the growth, sustainability and marketability of higher institutions. This is largely because decline in government funding and history have shown that education and research is a social responsibility---- commitment, thus must be on the part of everyone to advance it.

A very good article on this can be found here

In the next post, we begin to dissect these and then join the piece as it relates to the Nigerian educational sector.

See you then!