Dive Brief:
- The last two years have broken a steady upward trend in the amount of tuition revenue colleges, with the annual State Higher Education Finance Report finding, again, that schools are getting a larger share of their revenue from state funding and less from students.
- Tuition made up 46.5% of revenue in 2015, down from a 2013 high of 47.8%, but the latest average includes Vermont schools getting 84.9% of revenue from tuition and 15 states getting more than 60%.
- Inside Higher Ed reports numbers from the Grapevine report show 4.1% growth in state support for higher education in 2016, but again, disparities exist, and a handful of states are likely to see additional cuts. Public colleges in Illinois and Pennsylvania are still recovering from months-long budget standoffs.
Dive Insight:
State disinvestment in higher education has been identified as a key culprit in rising tuition costs for students, and in turn, rising student debt. For the last three years, states have appropriated, on average, more per student than the prior year. That followed four years of declines from 2009 to 2012. The disparities across states, however, are considerable.
The governor of Illinois just approved the first payout to public colleges and universities in the 2015-16 fiscal year that started last July, signing a stopgap measure that is meant only to keep schools operating through the summer. A long-term fiscal plan is still deadlocked in the state assembly. Similarly, a handful of colleges in Arizona can barely be called public, with little to no funding actually coming from the state.