Universities as economic organizations

Universities are without any doubt economic organizations. They use economically valuable resources, transform them into economically valuable results, and make decisions on the allocation of money to alternative resources or the allocation of resources to alternative mixes of outputs. Yet universities are not only economic organizations. More importantly, they do not conceivethemselves as economic organizations. They come from a historical tradition in which the economic dimension was somewhat hidden behind the veil of claims about goals on national education, national potential for research, and national prestige.