That’s the crux of a new report titled “A Great Recession, a Great Retreat: A Call for a Public College Quality Compact,” released Monday by the Center for American Progress.
The report shows that between fiscal year 2003 and fiscal year 2010, state funding declined from 30.9 percent of total revenue for public colleges to 22.3 percent. Meanwhile, as college costs rose, more students began to borrow more money. Specifically, the share of students borrowing to pay for college grew from 35 percent to 40 percent between 2008 and 2012, and the average amount borrowed annually rose from $6,200 to $7,800, the report states.
U.S. Under Secretary of Education Ted Mitchell said the report speaks to the need to tackle what he characterized as “systematic disinvestment by states throughout the Great Recession in higher education.”
“I think it’s critically important as states’ economies improve and the nation’s economy improves for us to remind our partners at the state level that where they are is not OK,” Mitchell said. “The taking of what was a fairly balanced three-party compact between states and families and the federal government and unbalancing that in a way that really does damage to the students that we’re most concerned have access to and through college needs to change dramatically.”
He said the U.S. Department of Education has sought for the past several years to make college more affordable through its proposed State Higher Education Performance Fund of $4 billion. The proposed fund would use competitive state grants to encourage “systemic efforts to make higher education more affordable and increase college access and success, particularly for low-income students,” according to the department.
The compact called for by the Center for American Progress is far more ambitious in that it envisages using some $1.4 trillion in revenue over a span of 10 years that the center believes can be raised through bipartisan tax reform that would — among other things — scrap various tax breaks for business that the center believes are being exploited.
