U.S. university public-private partnerships, known as P3s, have surged in popularity in the last decade. However budgetary pressures from the 2008 recession eroded state funding for U.S. public universities.
Becker Shareholder Lee Weintraub, a leader in the field of P3s, shared, “The Great Recession caused funding for public universities to take a dive and they did not have the money to build new facilities, let alone maintain the facilities they had anymore. And so it became almost a financial crisis at the university level. A lot of developers, mostly from Europe and Australia and Canada, who had been doing these P3s for a while, came to America with ideas about how they could help. The success of some of these early P3 projects increased the popularity of P3s as a model for universities.”