The focus of this paper is the coalition United Kingdom government policy on university funding in England as a political economy. It depicts higher education as a public and private good in the context of international trends in ‘cost sharing’ and it addresses the centrality of economic drivers for the profile and orientation of higher education, particularly in England. On the basis of an examination of documents available in the public domain, it also assesses how new funding arrangements might embody a distinctive attribution of value to higher education in general and disciplinary practice in particular. This domain of inquiry is termed the political economy of funding because it seeks to examine the social and political meaning of these economic decisions and their implications.