Beginning with the 2014-15 academic year, the UCLA Anderson School of Management will no longer rely on state funding but will instead be completely self-supporting, the school reported last week. University of California President Mark Yudof approved the school’s proposed status change for its full-time MBA program on June 24th, ending a three-year review process.
The decision is expected to make it easier for the school to fund-raise with its alumni and philanthropic donors, to make tuition fees more predictable and to give the school greater flexibility in faculty assignments, according to UCLA Anderson Dean Judy Olian, who has led the campaign to win self-supporting status for the school.
“UCLA Anderson is well positioned for the future, and this change further enables us to address MBA student and program needs,” she said in a statement. “We also believe that our alumni and friends will be energized by the clarity of the school’s financial model, and its singular dependence on self-generated funding and philanthropy.”
“People are confused about what state support might be,” Olian told the Financial Times, noting that net state support covers only 6 percent of current tuition fees. She believes that knowing that there is no state funding at all will help “alumni and philanthropic donors to step up to the plate,” she added.
Yudof approved the change in status because he believes the school will have “the same academic requirements, the same faculty, the same curricula, the same kinds of students, the same admissions requirements and the same academic delivery model,” he wrote in a letter to UCLA Chancellor Gene Block. He did place a few conditions on his decision, including that student financial aid will continue to be available to students who need it at a level commensurate with other UC full-time state-supported MBA programs.
More than $8 million in state support previously allocated to the program will now transfer to the university at large. “In every other respect, UCLA Anderson remains a part of UCLA exactly as before,” Olian said in a statement. “We see this change benefiting both the university and UCLA Anderson, a creative strategy in response to declining funding from the state.”
Read more about UCLA Anderson’s planned transition to financial self-sufficiency.
