Universities Need a Market Orientation to Attract Non-Traditional Stakeholders as New Financing Sources

Reflecting the level of priority currently attributed to public university financing in ongoing discussions, the objective of this article is to debate alternative forms of attracting resources from stakeholders not normally associated with the financing of public universities. We begin by detailing sources of university financing as it slowly migrates from the public sector to the market. After we move on to describe the main public university stakeholders and the respective relationships between the parties. Finally, our discussion focuses on different means and alternatives ways, to finance public universities through use of non-traditional stakeholders giving some examples. In conclusions we find that despite university managers normally being aware of such entities, the other internal university actors show a lack of pro-activeness regarding the opportunities presented by different stakeholders. So the public universities need to actively engage with the marketplace, and this reality can be achieved if at internal level they are assigned priorities for the relationships with these new stakeholders. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014