[Excerpt] In an important paper written for the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, Harold Hovey pointed out that even if economic growth continued, the outlook for state funding of public higher education might not be as rosy as it had been in the recent past. My objective in this paper is to speculate about the financial futures of both public and private higher education, using Hovey’s paper as a base. After outlining his argument about the hard times ahead for public higher education, I will discuss the responses that campus and system administrators may well undertake. I will then turn to the financial pressure that private higher education institutions will face and the likely responses of these institutions. As will come as no surprise to most readers, I conclude that ten years from now the privates will look more like the publics and the publics will look more like the privates.