Universities need donors — with no strings attached

By Caire McIlveen. With a university student in the household, talk occasionally turns to the value of a university degree.
My daughter’s generation tends to see university as training that can lead to a better job and higher pay, while my spouse and I, both liberal arts grads, talk about how universities support the pursuit of knowledge and teach independent thinking for an engaged citizenry.
But times have changed.
As author Linda McQuaig pointed out in an editorial board meeting here this week, while universities were 80 per cent publicly funded back in the’70s or’80s, today only about half of their funding is public. (In Nova Scotia, that figure is 57 per cent.)
Funding from Ottawa, in particular, has dropped. More...