In 48 U.S. states, government spending on each college student is still below where it was before the recession that ended almost six years ago. Now, at least seven governors propose cutting deeper.
As Bloomberg reports, Republican leaders in Louisiana and Wisconsin—whose governors hold White House ambitions—as well as Illinois, Arizona, Alaska and West Virginia, all would reduce support for colleges and universities in budgets under consideration this year. Connecticut’s Democratic Gov. Dannel Malloy has joined them. In Kansas, shortfalls induced by tax cuts championed by Republican Gov. Sam Brownback led to a 2% cut to universities set to take effect this week.
The proposals are part of a decades-long shift of making students pay for an increasing share of post-secondary education, leading to tuition increases at public institutions that outpace those at private schools. They come as a diploma, a driver of social and economic mobility that fueled the country’s post-war boom, is more important than ever to individual and state prosperity.
“When we’re saying more and more Americans need to have this education, we’re pricing it so that the vast group that has never had it before can’t afford it,” says George Pernsteiner, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers association.
Two-thirds of the 165 million U.S. jobs in 2020 will require education beyond high school, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. In 1973, fewer than a third did.
Students and families are shouldering a bigger share of the burden. Tuition accounted for about 48% of public higher-education revenue in 2013, the latest year for which data are available, according to Pernsteiner’s organization, which is based in Boulder, Colorado. That’s double what it was in 1988.
