<p>^ Wow, those are enormous cuts at Harvard—not to say they didn’t have a lot of fat that could be trimmed.</p>
<p>I think it’s a mistake to generalize about whether “state schools” or “private schools” are going to be hurt worse in the current economy. As best I can see, they’re all hurting, but their individual circumstances vary widely on both sides of the public/private divide. Some (like Harvard and Yale) made riskier bets on their endowments, which allowed their endowments to swell in flush times but that strategy came crashing down in them when their investmetns went sour last year. Others managed their investments more cautiously, and some have suffered far smaller losses. Worse off, probably, are small private colleges with no endowment to speak of; they’re heavily dependent on tuition revenue and with more students shopping harder for the best FA, some of these schools may have trouble filling the seats, which takes them perilously close to a death spiral. By the same token, some public universities are taking a big hit from their legislatures, while other states are in better fiscal shape. And then there are those like the University of Michigan that have been so starved by their legislatures for so long that they’re barely even “public” anymore, with legislative appropriations making up such a small fraction of their budget that even significant cuts in state aid will likely have only a relatively minor impact on the university’s overall budget. (Though so far, Michigan’s governor is only talking about a 3% cut to higher education, which amounts to a small fraction of 1% of the University’s overall budget).</p>
<p>So I think the title of this thread should be “Whither state schools in Maine?” because it’s really quite misleading to generalize on the Maine experience.</p>