Skip over at The Sports Economist posts this interesting story about how the scandal involving the University of Colorado football team is emboldening the economist-president of the University to push the University’s Board of Regents and the Colorado State Legislature to grant the University “enterprise status,” which would make it a semiprivate institution with more independence over financial matters such as raising money and setting tuition rates.
Skip comments insightfully on this development as follows:

This issue is not unique to Colorado. The University of Virginia is a well known example where state funding has become a small percentage of operating expenditure. Clemson has the same problem. The issue is not just “managing finances,” but having the freedom to make autonomous decisions on numerous margins which affect the university. Given the dry well in public funding, schools want to be released from regulatory constraints on what they do. Increasingly, good state universities are obtaining a more private character. Schools that do not move in this direction will surely suffer in the national competition for quality students and faculty.

This is a development in public school financing that we Texans should be watching closely. Public financing of universities in Texas has long been a controversial issue, with the University of Texas and Texas A&M University long enjoying an absurdly and unjustifiable favored financing status over all other public universities in Texas. As a result, leaders of Texas public universities in areas of great fund-raising potential (three examples would be the University of Houston, North Texas State University, and Texas Tech University) would be well-advised to follow the “enterprise status” initiative at the University of Colorado. It may well be a way for those universities to break out of the politically imposed financial limitations that have constrained their overall advancement for many years.