Introduction

Once an élite system dealing with a privileged few, UK universities now have to deal with the challenges of educating many more students. State funding per student has become constrained as the country has struggled to control the increases in costs that the expanded number of students entails. Semiautonomous* universities are therefore looking for revenue streams to bolster increasingly restricted government funding. Two particular issues have emerged as responses to resource constraint as universities and the state have grappled with generating revenue and controlling costs: internationalization and private sector involvement. Both of these are considered here in order to illustrate the context of the theme articles contained in this issue of Public Money & Management. * Universities have a level of autonomy but reliance on government funding constrains their autonomy (Broadbent, 2011). This is manifest in a variety of ways, but particularly in control of undergraduate student numbers, limiting the number of home and European Union students that a university can recruit.