The choice of the mission and the manner in which it is financed are inextricably linked for any college or university. Research, teaching, and outreach lead schools to invest in specific means to raise revenue to support their missions. Lobbying, international expansion, and distance education are excellent examples of distinct ways of financing schools' particular missions.

LOBBYING: SPENDING MONEY TO MAKE MONEY

Lobbying legislatures for funding or legislation has a long (if sometimes unsavory) history in the United States. Colleges and universities have increasingly included lobbying among their methods of revenue pursuit, just as organizations in other industries have. Public, nonprofit, and for-profit schools are spending money on in-house lobbyists or on lobbyists from outside firms. Influencing Congress to enact favorable legislation can advance a research university's efforts or lead to regulatory changes desired by for-profit schools. We find some intriguing patterns of lobbying activity in higher education.

The search for revenue led three universities to spend close to $1 million each on lobbying in 2004 – $930,000 by Boston University, $937,000 by the University of Miami, and $940,000 by Johns Hopkins University (Center for Responsive Politics 2007), and over the next three years a number of schools reported annual lobbying expenditures over $700,000 – including Harvard and Northwestern as well as Johns Hopkins and Boston Universities. These sums are tiny in the overall budgets of these schools where research expenditures alone, in 2005, were $337 million at Boston, $287 million at Miami, and $1.7 billion at Johns Hopkins (AUTM 2005).