The Impact Of Global Financial Crisis On World-Class Universities And Their Responses

Higher education has been deeply integrated into the economicenvironment. The former financial crisises impacted higher education indifferent fields. The outbreak of the global financial crisis in2008not onlyled governments to cut higher education funding, but also made universityendowments shrink seriously. In addition, some universities in Americahad to stop all kinds of recruitment with cutting faculty positions andlimiting the increase of teachers’ salary. While there were substantialincrease in tuition in some public universities.This study focuses on the direct impact of the financial crisis to the sixworld-class universities in three aspects, including revenue andexpenditure, endowment, teachers and students. At the same time, thisstudy also explores the responses of the six universities. It has been foundthat after the global financial crisis, the six universities`finance still stayedin health owing to diversified sources of income, generous research funding as well as the stability of the endowment spending whichovercomed the shink of governments`funding. Stable endowmentspending depended on the smoothed spending policy which buffered thestrike of dramatically shrink to the ability of endowment spending. Thenumber of tenured teachers remained stable after the financial crisis, whilethe number of non-tenured teachers reduced slightly. After the globalfinancial crisis, both tenured and non-tenured teachers`salaries increasedbut the rate declined. Besides, tuition of public universities in U.S. andUK`s universities increased sharply. The six universities all stepped up thescholarships to protect the poor`s enrollment opportunities. The number ofundergraduates was stable after the financial crisis, but there was a slightincrease in the number of graduate students.