A recent period of higher education cutbacks in Illinois has created affordability and equity gaps for underrepresented students.
That’s according to new reports by the Partnership of College Completion (PCC). The reports note that from 2002 to 2018, funding for Illinois public universities was cut over 50 percent and community colleges saw a similar disinvestment. This caused many institutions to increase the cost of tuition to make up for the loss.
“When you cut education, you don’t cut the costs, you just shift the costs from the state to institutions, then from the institutions to students,” said Michael Abrahamson, policy analyst at PCC. “So, it disproportionality hurts students who have the least ability to pay and institutions that have the smallest financial market. It affects Black and Latinx students in Illinois in different ways but all to some degree because of how those costs are being shifted to students.”
In order to analyze the state-wide underfunding impact on Black and Latinx students, PCC recently released two reports as part of a three-part series. The findings were organized based on major themes including access, cost and the ability to pay.
“We rarely talk about the impact on students and we rarely talk about the ways in which the state of Illinois really retreating from it’s historic investment in higher education has impacted the life trajectories of hundreds of thousands of students over the last 15 years,” said Kyle P. Westbrook, founding executive director at PCC.
In the study, Priced Out: Black Students On Illinois’ Disinvestment In Higher Education and What Can Be Done About It, researchers reveal that in 2017, 11,100 fewer Black students attended Illinois’ public and private nonprofit colleges compared to 2007, regardless of the similar numbers of high school graduates.
Westbrook said that some of the enrollment decline was caused by the recession. It was expected that once the recession ended, enrollment would be equivalent to where it was pre-recession, if not more. However, that was not the case.
