Since the 2008 Great Recession, state funding for higher education across the country has only halfway recovered, according to findings from the 2018 State Higher Education Report recently released by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO).
The State Higher Education Report also delves into how students and their families took on additional responsibility for supporting public higher education as states attempted to spring back from the 2008 recession. The report also provides a complete look at how states have worked through complex funding environments and undertook efforts in fiscal 2018 to restore public support in higher education.
“State leaders had to make tough decisions about how to finance their public systems of higher education as their economies weathered the Great Recession,” said SHEEO president Dr. Robert E. Anderson. “Many states used higher education as a balance wheel so they could preserve funding in other areas. But tighter purse strings also compelled state leaders to adopt new, innovative ways of thinking about higher education funding.”
As evidence that state support for higher education has only halfway recovered in the last 10 years, the authors of the report evaluated their data on a per full-time equivalent or per student basis, said Dr. Sophia Laderman, the lead author of the report and senior policy analyst at SHEEO.
“And then we adjusted everything for inflation using the higher education cost adjustment,” she said. “So when we’re looking at how state’s have recovered, we’re looking at our student inflation adjusted number. What we did was looked at the decline from 2008, which is the high point for funding before the Great Recession or really at the start of the Great Recession. And we compared that to 2012 and 2013, which were the low points in various states after some state decline. And then we compared that to this year to see how state’s have recovered after those cuts.”
According to the report, state and local government support for higher education increased by 20.3 percent from 2013, reaching a new record of $99 billion in 2018. Nationally, state funding for public higher education increased at about the rate of inflation, or by 2 percent in the last year, from $86.5 billion to $88.2 billion in 2018.
Funding for operations at independent institutions increased by 22.5 percent over the last five years, whereas state funding for non-credit and continuing education programs decreased by 12.2 percent. These funds account for less than 1 percent of state and local support.
