Some financial issues in postsecondary education which, though more or less obscured by other concerns at present, may soon gain national attention. These issues are: our national policy of regarding postsecondary education as a discretionary spending item in either inflationary or recessionary times; the steady-state syndrome, a mind-set that leads to the dangerous assumption that funding levels should not change; the concept of entitlement, and the related issues of a lack of correspondence between federal student aid and state or regional plans; the demand that public institutions get rid of unviable or marginally efficient programs in combination with the high cost of phasing out or converting current programs; and the growing tendency for legislatures to link funding to productivity, quantitatively assessed. Along with these issues are some that seem to offer no offensive strategy: the emerging dominance of student aid as a delivery mechanism for financing postsecondary education; and the place of Voc/Tech and proprietary sectors on the funding picture of postsecondary education. (Author/KE)