Introduction to Revenues and Expenditures

 

Describing revenues and expenditures within higher education is a daunting task because so much complexity exists. Colleges and universities obtain revenues from a variety of activities and sources, and categorizing those revenues into a manageable number of groups requires you to lump together revenues that are not very similar. Categorizing spending is also not an easy activity, because universities and their employees engage in a variety of activities at the same time, such as teaching, research, public service, and other activities. Trying to determine which dollars go into which categories is almost an impossible task that requires one to make arbitrary decisions.

We could explain these points in greater detail, but you would almost undoubtedly fall asleep before we finished that explanation as this material is very dry and technical. Some of you may have even found the previous paragraph to be a bit sleepy!

Consequently, we will paper over these complexities and just focus on major points reflecting revenues and expenditures. Because we will be presenting data reported by schools to the federal government through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data Systems (IPEDS), we will use the categories employed by IPEDS to categorize revenues and expenditures.