Dive Brief:
- For the fourth straight year, states have spent more on higher education than they did in the previous year, according to a new survey from the State Higher Education Executive Officers and the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University.
- States on average increased higher education spending by more than 3% in 2016, with only 10 states reporting declines in college investment.
- With trends tracked back to 2008, higher education spending is up more than 16% overall in the last nine years, with Hawaii, Idaho, South Dakota, and Virginia leading the states in the highest increase levels.
Dive Insight:
While many state legislatures continue to claim hardship on the subject of higher education spending, several studies show that states are slowly coming back to pre-recession spending levels. But with endowments suffering from significant losses in the stock market, it is up to college leaders to show why these trends should continue, and what they will mean in building industries in their surrounding cities and regions.
States like West Virginia will move slower than a state like California in showcasing industrial demand for higher education expansion, but the goal in both states is the same and requires college executives to show a data-driven outline of where dollars invested in higher education eventually wind up in employee taxes and consumerism.