Sources of Funding in Prestigious Universities in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada, and how Saudi universities can benefit from them

Abstract

Higher education institutions play significant roles in spreading science and developing human resources, which reflects positively on human societies and their prosperity. The current study aims to discover sources of revenue in four elite universities from four countries: the British University of Oxford, the American Harvard, the Canadian University of Toronto, and the Australian University of Melbourne. The study also aimed to find out how to benefit from the experiences of revenue diversification in the four universities in diversifying the sources of income for Saudi public universities, which still rely heavily on one source of funding: government funds. The study used the descriptive, documentary, and analytical approach to suit the objectives and questions of the study, as the official financial reports issued by those universities were reviewed and analyzed. The study also established several criteria for selecting the four universities. One of the most prominent results of the study is that elite universities deliberately diversify their sources of revenue. Student fees, revenues from endowments, investments, donations, sponsored research, and contracts constituted significant funding sources for these universities. The study proposed several recommendations for Saudi universities to benefit from the experiences of the four elite universities in the financial field