Adopting the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index to estimate the financial sustainability of Vietnamese public universities

Over several decades, the Vietnamese government has increasingly cut its investment in the public higher education system and has also introduced a cost-sharing mechanism. Under this scheme, Vietnamese public universities have been seeking other sources of revenue. Despite the bold emphasis on the need for revenue diversification in higher education in Vietnam, there is little empirical evidence of the status quo of Vietnamese public higher education finance. The purpose of this paper was to fill this research gap by using the Hirschman–Herfindahl Index to estimate the degree of financial diversity in 51 public universities in Vietnam between 2015 and 2017. Our findings revealed that all institutions in this study were unsustainable due to their weak financial diversity. Suggestions for policy makers and university leaders that may enhance financial sustainability include the adoption of performance-based financial allocations and the implementation of capacity-building programs for universities with regard to fund-raising and entrepreneurship skills.

DESIGN FINANCIAL ACCOUNTING USING BLOCKCHAIN APPROACH IN EDUCATION

<p><em>Indonesia is entering the 4.0 revolution, which brings many changes in all fields, including technology. The most extensive new technology is decentralized with transparent, convenient, permanent, and irreplaceable characteristics, commonly known as Blockchain. Blockchain has been applied in all fields, especially in the field of technology. But Blockchain technology is currently still in the pilot stage which has some issues and needs to be resolved. These include regulatory difficulties, limited information processing capacity, and data confidentiality. This article describes the ability to implement Blockchain technology in educational, financial accounting. Therefore, this study proposes a framework design for higher education finance to improve the security of the ledger. In the long term, this platform can efficiently reduce disclosure and earnings management errors, improve the quality of educational accounting data, and reduce data asymmetry. The analysis method by calculating the SUS score against the accounting Blockchain system shows 85, so this framework is included in the Net Promoter category. The final result of this research can optimize financial finance in higher education by using Blockchain.</em></p>

Unpaid Tuition Balances at Community Colleges: An Exploratory Analysis Delinquent Tuition Debt and Graduation

The rising cost of higher education has led to increased tuition costs for students and their families, forcing more students to secure larger amounts of debt to finance their educational pursuits. Although scholars have explored how student loan debt accumulation influences higher education persistence and graduation, an unexplored area of higher education finance and debt is the relationship between unpaid tuition balances on community college student graduation. This analysis attempts to illuminate this gap by utilizing a unique institutional dataset with data from the National Student Clearinghouse to analyze the relationship between unpaid tuition balances and postsecondary graduation for community college students. Results suggest that having an outstanding tuition balance dramatically decreases the likelihood of graduation 3 years out from the unpaid balance. Implications for future research and practice are discussed.

A Human Resources Administration Document Analysis of the State of the States (2013–2019)

P–12 and higher education finance policies and resources impact human resources administration. By examining education finance policy analyses covering fifty states written from 2013 to 2019, we illuminate human resource trends and challenges that emerged during this time. The purpose of this document analysis was to synthesize and share emerging human resources trends in education finance from across 50 states with a wide audience of P–12 and higher education administrators, graduate students, and policymakers, paying particular attention to issues of educational inequities. We identified key human resources administration areas where state financial support for P–12 has increased (pre-K, special education, and English language learning), areas of priority for state policymakers for both P–12 and higher education (career and technical education, performance-based funding), and challenges for P–12 (stagnating teacher pay coupled with rising health insurance and retirement costs and increasing student enrollment).

The Right to Residency: Mobility, Tuition, and Public Higher Education Access

This article argues that the now-widespread US practice of residency-based tuition differentials for public higher education institutions is a twentieth-century form of higher education exceptionalism carved out in law and state policy, contradicting otherwise cherished and protected rights of free movement. This contradiction has been enabled in part by the vague standard of constitutional protection for the right to interstate mobility and in part by fiscal deference to public universities that quickly recognized the potential benefits of higher nonresident tuition rates. By both defining higher education as outside of the “necessities of life” and upholding a narrative that the children of state residents had a special entitlement to lower tuition as a kind of “legacy” taxpayer inheritance, courts, legislatures, and educational institutions built a modern higher education finance structure that discriminates against the mobility of “newcomers” and any student with a complicated family structure or residency status.

Higher Education Finance Between Ghana and the United States

Over the years, there has been a tremendous increase in enrollment in higher education as well as the cost of attendance. This article comparatively analyzes the higher education finance between the United States of America (U.S.A.) and Ghana, taking into consideration the goals of higher education, enrollment and expenditure, and the various sources of finance available to students in both countries. The source of education finance between both countries is examined through the lens of neoliberalism, which prioritizes capitalism, free trade, and market in public institutions, specifically higher education. While there are disparities in the financing of higher education in both countries, there is a similarity in the limited access to higher education and funding by students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Higher Education Finance

The financing of higher (or tertiary) education deals with issues of resourcing (i.e., funding) higher education institutions, their students, and their (academic and nonacademic) staff. The study of higher education finance covers the sources of funding for higher education (including the balance between public and private funds) as well as the uses of those funds (for education, research, student support, infrastructure, staffing, campus development, etc.). The management of funds is essentially a study of choice—about using scarce resources to achieve often-conflicting goals—which implies that it also extends to issues of priority setting, effectiveness, and efficiency. In many ways, these are questions of a political-economic nature. With higher education being such a large part of the public sector, the study of higher education finance, on the one hand, may be seen as part of public finance, while on the other hand, as a subfield of the economics of education. In times of shrinking public budgets, there is increasing scrutiny on how public resources for higher education are allocated and used. At the national (country, state) level, reforms in educational financing are frequently debated in policy circles, with the goal of identifying the funding mechanism that produces the best outcomes in terms of guaranteeing access for students, high-quality education, and high-quality research, as well as connecting this education and research to the needs of society. At the level of the higher education institution (i.e., university, college, or specialized institution), debates will often focus on the internal budgeting system and how the institution can make sure it runs its operations in a financially sound way in the short term, with sufficient incentives for efficiency and revenue generation, as well as incentives for innovation on the mid- to long term. All of this illustrates the many trade-offs and dilemmas that appear in the study of higher education finance. It also shows that the topic of higher education finance touches on many other research fields in higher education, including, for example, governance, privatization, and student financial aid. And given the political-economic nature of these issues, many conceptual approaches used for the study of higher education finance are imported from economics, political science, public administration, public policy, or organizational studies. Because the field of higher education finance is constantly evolving, the topics that are at the forefront of scholarly research are to be found primarily in academic journals. The themes covered in the study of higher education finance deal with some of the above-mentioned major trade-offs and dilemmas. After first presenting some of the general-overview works in higher education finance, this article will cover some of these themes touching on the most-important policy debates in higher education finance.