When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, his famous (and, as it turns out, apocryphal retort was: “Because that’s where the money is.”

The subject of this week’s Carnival of Journalism is the changing role of universities in meeting the information needs of their community. I’m sure that many others will do a much better job than I would of writing about reforming curricula to include training in the digital arts, entrepreneurship, and what my friend George Kelly calls “getting away from the article as the unit of production” to adapt to the idea of news as a stream beginning with sources and flowing far beyond publication through social and conversational media.

When I thought about what I could add to the conversation, all I could think about was…money. Many people I meet describe themselves as “recovering journalists,” but if I used the same convention, I guess I’d have to say that I’m a recovering market analyst. Looking at the world through the lens of “how many” and “how much” is second nature to me.

The simple fact is that universities are huge pools of cash. Anyone teaching, particularly as an adjunct, is in my opinion entitled to feel a little sour on that front, since little of the money taken in in tuition — and in many, many other ways — goes to them. We haven’t really recovered from the recession of 2008, and that recession marked the lowest point for the US economy in my lifetime.

In this economy, who still has money? Well, healthcare industries and universities. Note that I’m not saying that these aren’t tough times for them too, but they’re in industries where spending on what they offer is still rising.

It’s difficult to find information on the total amount families spend on higher education in the US, but the federal government alone spends in excess of a trillion dollars annually on education, billions in financial aid to students alone.

It’s a big market. Many universities are billion-dollar enterprises. If Harvard’s endowment were a country, their GDP would put them in the top ten countries in the world.

So what does that have to do with meeting the information needs of a community?

Well, doing that takes money — and they’ve got it. I’m not saying that universities should start spending money to build newsrooms (although that would be nice), but their sheer bulk provides a useful shelter for all sorts of journalistic experiments. Many of the people doing journalism experiments today get their healthcare and office space from universities.

So what role should universities play in meeting the information needs of their communities? Well, they should continue to be welcoming places for such experiments. I also think there’s a lot to be said for considering making the college newsroom’s newspaper an outward-facing enterprise, rather than an inward-facing one covering only campus issues. I think this would be great for the communities and make involvement in student publications a better experience for journalism majors.

The Knight Community Information Challenge sponsors one such experiment: TheNewsOutlet.org, which is a collaboration between the journalism department of Youngstown University and several traditional media outlets in Youngstown, Ohio. Student reporters write stories under the direction of professional journalists, and those pieces are then distributed via the project’s website and local papers and radio stations.