President Obama’s administration certainly doesn’t stand alone in regard to uncertainty surrounding the issues in higher education. Aware of the trending concerns, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) answered the nation’s most common questions in a 12-page report.
Comprised of answers to nine of the most frequently asked questions directed toward the APLU, the report addressed topics ranging from examining student debt to explaining increased tuition rates. The APLU gathered data from supporting reports that education organizations published within the last year, such as College Board’s Trends in College Pricing, the Delta Cost Project dataset and Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce’s series of research.
In presenting numerical records around rising tuition rates, student debt mounds and institutional budget challenges, the APLU compared statistics of public to private universities. The report further separated schools into profit versus non-profit, but mainly focused on the issues affecting public institutions.
Finding the most prevalent issues as a crisis in tuition increase, the APLU constructed the majority of their answers around policies that education leaders implemented in order to control costs of education.
“Our public higher education institutions have faced the dual challenge in recent years of falling state appropriations and large increases in student enrollment,” APLU President Peter McPherson stated.
The report supported McPherson’s observation and documented the difference in tuition costs within the last decade. In 1990, state governments paid for about two-thirds of the cost of education for each full-time student, leaving one-third of tuition costs as the student’s responsibility. To date, the revenue theory has flipped and two-thirds of tuition is withdrawn from the student while the rest is made up in state aid.
McPherson suggested that change in college pricing is a direct result of steep declines in state support for public universities.
