For many states, such as CO, AZ, CA, FL, IA, GA, WA, TX, WI, MO, the increase in state university tuition from 2000-2014 reflects the decrease in state funding during that time. There are some outliers, such as IL, where tuition was raised significantly even though state funding was cut only slightly, and ND, AK, WY, where both tuition and state funding were raised (these were the only three states where state funding per student increased).
“At most, about a quarter of the increase in college tuition since 2000 can be attributed to rising faculty salaries, improved amenities and administrative bloat.”
So a more precise subtitle is “failure to maintain low infrastructure and administrative overhead costs is at best a secondary factor.”
This has also led to a widening disparity between the top rich privates and publics.
Those privates have also raised prices a lot but that money has been plowed back in to extra student services, etc. that make the college experience better and more fruitful. Publics have raised prices but mostly to make up for the decrease in state support.
Temple enrolled 17,355 undergrads in 1998. At $7,750 per student, that’s total state support of $134 million. Temple enrolled 27,642 undergrads in 2014. At $3,900 per student (in constant dollars), that’s total state support of $107.8 million. To keep per student support FLAT at 1998 levels, state support would have had to increase 60% from $134 million to $214 million.
So the article does not even mention the primary driver of the math. Which is more students attending college in 2014 than in years past.
Aggregate state support has not gone down by that much (and may have been offset by increased federal support dollars). The story is more that state support did not keep increasing as fast as enrollment did.
The halcyon days of super-cheap state universities were not primarily enabled by more generous state tax payors back in the olden days. Instead, it was enabled by fewer kids taking advantage of the benefit.
Incomplete analysis on your part as well, @northwesty. Why should state support go down (as it has for Temple) or even stay flat when the economy and tax base have grown?
In real terms, the US economy in 2014 is 20% bigger than it was in 1998. So state support on higher ed has been cut back however you look at it.
Pretty telling that the author of this piece, a college prof, speaks only in terms of “per student support” declining by 75%. But never once mentions that most of the “per student support” decline is due to student enrollment increasing by 60% over the time period he analyzes.
Typically, in a state university, when we say “per student support,” we tend to mean per in-state student support. I did not double-checked the author’s calculation. So I do not know the author’s working definition of per student support.
I now use the state university that I serve as an illustration. The effective in-state tuition is about $14,000. The unit cost per student is about $30,000. The state supports each in-state student about $2,000, and supports nothing for out-of-state students. As a result, we are losing about $12,000 on each in-state student we take in. To balance the budget, we need to take in more out-of-state students who can pay an effective tuition of around $34,000. That is, each out-of-state student subsidize about $4,000 to fill the gap of $12,000 induced by each in-state student. I bet now you can figure out that the number of out-of-state students in my university needs to be about 3 times that of in-state students in my university.
Yes, the enrollment has been increased, but that increase is largely coming from out-of-state students (particularly international students). The reason is that the unit cost keeps on increasing over time, whereas the total dollar state support remained rather flat. As we are losing more and more money on each in-state student over time. It would not take too long to see we lose $15,000 or more on each in-state student. This would mean that if we keep the profit margin the same for each out-of-state student, we would be forced to take in an even lower percentage of in-state students relative to all students in the future.
If this mathematic is still not clear enough, just look at the University of California system. A lot of press coverage on this and there was also a state audit. They all showed that UC is taking less and less in-state students in terms of percentage. Just talk to a few California parents and I bet many of them will complain to you about how hard nowadays for in-state students to get into UC Berkeley because less-qualified (as claimed by the state audit report) out-of-state students are willing to pay higher prices and thus take away their kids’ spots.
I do not know how to edit my above statement. As a result, a qualifier is offered here. We are actually losing slightly more than $12,000 on each in-state student. It is more close to $14,000. As a matter of fact, for class 2020, my university takes in slightly more than 20% of in-state students.
Prof2 – you are right about state support calcs needing to adjust for in state and out of state enrollment.
Temple is about 18% out-of-state today. I don’t know how that compares to 15 years ago. But Temple (a gritty urban campus) does not seem to fit the model of destination state schools (UCLA, Cal, Alabama, Michigan, Colorado, Ole Miss etc.) who are making budget by growing their OOS enrollment.
A 60% enrollment increase would dramatically any calculation of per student support numbers. The author discusses multiple potential cost factors (fancy dorms, admin bloat, lazy rivers, etc) and then dismisses them as incorrect. Why doesn’t he do that for enrollment increase too? Instead, he never mentions enrollment headcount. That’s dishonest. If he wants to re-write his article to explain why a 60% enrollment increase is not relevant, I’d consider it.
Why doesn’t he mention what aggregate state support to Temple was in 2000 vs 2016?
The actual likely numbers are not that PA “cut” state support to Temple by 75%. More likely, the data would be that Temple today receives roughly the same number of constant dollars as it did in 2000. But Temple’s per student support dropped dramatically because its enrollment exploded.
So the “cut” in PA support was really more of a failure to dramatically keep growing aggregate support dollars as Temple grew to be way larger than it used to be. Supporting 1.6X Temple at the same per student level as Temple 1.0 requires many more dollars…
@prof2dad What metric are you using that comes up to $30,000 a student? The three standard IPEDs measures are:
Some examples(2014):
Temple University:
Instructional Expenditures/FTE = $11,097
Student-Related Expenditures/FTE: $11,158
Educational and General Expenditures / FTE: $28,912
Penn State:
Instructional Expenditures/FTE = $16,877
Student-Related Expenditures/FTE: $13,789
Educational and General Expenditures / FTE: $43,956
UC-Berkeley:
Instructional Expenditures/FTE = $19,397
Student-Related Expenditures/FTE: $14,707
Educational and General Expenditures / FTE: $59,519
The Educational and General Expenditures / FTE is very misleading at research universities, as it includes research expenditures and those are funded by grants, etc.
The University of Delaware is in a similar situation to your institution. A large OOS %, with In-state tuition at, $12,500, OOS tuition over $31K. Tuition makes up about 50% of revenue, while state support makes up a bit more than 10%. The other 40% of revenue comes from “Auxiliaries”, “Grants, Contracts & Recoveries”, “Endowment/TII”, Gifts and “other”.
If you’re looking at Educational and General Expenditures, then we should include all sources of revenue (like research funding).
However, all this mumbo jumbo aside, your point is valid. Your school depends on a very high % of OOS students and associated tuition revenue for operations.
This is easy. Other state cost (entitlements/healthcare) have soared, far outpacing the increase in state revenue. Higher Education has to compete against these other priorities, and it usually comes in last.
@Gator88NE: this is number that our assistant dean provided to us for our internal planning of course offerings, etc. We need to do so in our school because our university requires every unit balances its own budget. This is the number that we need to work with. You are correct. Our university is kind of like U. of Delaware: locate in a small state; the state has a small tax base and thus the university cannot be a large research university; and, we are almost tuition-driven.
Let’s say PA sends Temple $100 million in 2000 when it has 10,000 in state undergrads. In 2014, PA also sends $100 million when Temple has 16,000 undergrads.
Is the accurate and fair headline “PA cuts state support of Temple by 40%”?
Maybe the headline instead should be “State support of Temple fails to keep up with exploding enrollment”?
FYI, this trend has been going on for 150 years. Much easier to provide large support to public colleges when fewer people enroll.
“Public higher education was often free when a very small percentage of students attended, said Roger L. Geiger, education professor at Penn State and author of The History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II. “Historically, many individual institutions refrained from student charges, including early Stanford. Community colleges were often free, being considered an extension of secondary schools.” he said.”
Temple had 19,000 undergraduates in 2002, while in 2015, that number was up to 28,600. I haven’t seen any numbers on how much was allocated back in 2000, only the average per student. But since the number of students has increased by over 50%, if the state allocation had stayed the same, you would see a decrease in funding of around 50%. The state could be sending Temple more money in 2014, but with the increase headcount, the $ per student would be less.
@Gator88NE, we all know the logic, but why are you engaging in speculation about what the state is spending on Temple when we know that they sent them less money in 2014 than in 2000?
The numbers are earlier in this thread.
BTW, if enrollment increases by 50% and the money stays the same, the spending per student actually drops by a third.