Blossom – the reason why CC grad rates are bad is that most of the good students don’t go to CCs. They go to 4 year colleges.
Grad rates are primarily a function of the academic quality of the enrolled students. That’s why Yale has a 99% grad rate. Yale has great students – they’d graduate no matter what Yale does with them while they are there.
If all those decent middle class students went to CC for two years rather than university, CC grad rates would soar.
“The fact quoted above totally negates the other narrative of how the state schools have been de-funded since the 80’s - somebody is lying through their teeth.”
That narrative is, as the NY Times piece calls it, a fairy tale told by college administrators crying poverty and seeking even more cash:
“ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.”
“This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.”
Soar is something of an overstatement. In my area, the CC’s are not really set up to provide four semesters, in sequence, for the foundational courses a HS kid needs to move from CC to a four year degree in ONLY four years. It doesn’t matter how ambitious the kid is- if the courses aren’t there, or if you can only take the courses you need by spending 3 years in CC… and then potentially not all the credits will transfer correctly, you’ve taken a four year degree and stretched it into 5.
And the answer- build more classrooms and labs, hire more professors, create more capacity at the CC (and expand the parking lots and improve bus service) is of course a great answer- but why is building more infrastructure at the local level (I’m in an expensive metro area) cheaper than utilizing the infrastructure that’s already at the flagship (out in the middle of a former cow pasture).
I’m just skeptical that shoving highly motivated students onto an overburdened CC system is more cost effective overall. The economics don’t seem to work. For a particular kid- yes. Cheaper to live at home for two years. But for the entire college cohort of my state? The numbers don’t add up.
And although it’s fashionable to want the highly motivated kid to do 2 years at the CC and then the flagship- I’m not ready to chuck out the kid who only wants an ultrasound certificate from the CC who ALSO needs freshman biology in order to graduate. Doesn’t he get to register for the classes HE needs??? And if the answer is to build yet ANOTHER CC campus to accomodate the non-Bachelor’s degree students- yet more costs.
Northwesty- respectfully disagree with you. But agree with your analysis on Yale!!!
@furrydog State funding isn’t based on enrollment. Its possible (and has happen in the past) for overall state enrollment to drop, but state funding to increase.
We combine the two to get a funding per student number. It’s one way to track state appropriations. However, the states themselves don’t often directly link funding to enrollment. Typically, the state legislature with come up with an overall funding number for the state’s public universities/CC’s. It then allocates a portion to each school. In Florida, for example, UF gets far more allocated to it, than the larger (by enrollment) UCF.
Think of it this way, while state appropriations increased, student enrollment increased (at a lower rate than appropriations), as did the COA for college (higher tuition, fees, etc., at a rate higher than state appropriations). However, they are not directly linked. State appropriations is linked to the state budgeting process which is directly impacted by the states economy. As we saw in 2009, when the economy dips, so does appropriations, even though enrollment and COA continued to increase.
Well, I know some people who think Prof. Campos is a blowhard who has a history of playing fast-and-loose with statistics, selectively culling numbers that support his argument and then quickly shifting ground to another set of statistics when the data set he was quoting don’t support him. There’s actually been extensive commentary on this in, e.g., the Chronicle of Higher Education.
An example. Campos writes: "“Enrollment in undergraduate, graduate and professional programs has increased by almost 50 percent since 1995.”
This is an odd statistical reference in an opinion piece on why the cost of undergraduate public education is so high. What, exactly, is the relevance of the expansion of graduate and professional programs? Most states I’m familiar with invest next to nothing, or nothing at all, in graduate and professional education. They expect the professional students (law, business, medicine, etc.) to be able to take care of themselves even if they need to borrow heavily to secure their educational credentials. And they don’t worry much about grad students in more purely academic disciplines, either. Students in Master’s programs are mostly a cash cow for public universities; they pay their tuition and the university doesn’t support them with either need-based or merit aid. Students in Ph.D. programs are mostly supported by the university either out of its own funds or out of externally generated research grants, but this also makes financial sense because they’re a cheap source of labor as TAs (or GSIs as they’re denominated at some schools) or Research Assistants on funded research projects. So for the most part, legislators really aren’t thinking about graduate and professional students when they appropriate funds to state universities. They’re thinking about undergraduates. And undergraduate enrollment at public colleges and universities increased by 34% between 1995 and 2012, according to NCES–not 50%, the figure Campos cites because it better serves his argument. I don’t have immediate access to the data, but it may well be that graduate and professional programs increased more rapidly during this period, in part as a revenue-maximizing and/or cost-cutting strategy by public colleges and universities
OK, so 34% is still a hefty increase in undergraduate enrollment. But why, exactly, do we want to blame public colleges and universities for that, and say it’s their fault that they have less public funding per student because they simply grew too big? Historically it’s been their mission to educate every college-eligible state resident who wanted a college education. I can see two principal reasons that college enrollment has grown over this period. One is that the “echo boom” generation—the sons and daughters of the Baby Boomers—came of college age, creating record numbers of college-eligible HS graduates. The second is that college participation rates—the percentage of each cohort of college-eligible HS grads to attend college—have climbed inexorably, due in large measure to the collapse of blue collar jobs at wages capable of supporting a middle-class lifestyle. In my view, those reflect profound social needs that it’s the responsibility of the states, in the first instance, to address. But most states have defaulted on that responsibility, and instead decided to keep state appropriations to higher education constant in the face of rising demand, or actually cut finding notwithstanding rising demand. This is not true in all states; some, especially states with rapidly growing populations, have actually increased funding. But again, this is why just looking at aggregate state spending nationwide only creates a confusing and misleading (perhaps deliberately so) smokescreen. You really need to approach this question on a state-by-state basis to get a clear picture of the actual policy choices being made. Campos’ approach, however, is not that subtle, because it doesn’t serve his ideological point.
Notice also that Campos focuses on total college and university enrollment rather than enrollment at public colleges and universities. Again, this is at best highly misleading. Between 1990 and 2012, enrollment at public colleges and universities increased 34%. At private not-for profit colleges and universities, enrollment increased 35% over the same period. But at private for-profit colleges and universities, enrollment exploded by 845% over the same period. States are not in the business of subsidizing private for-profit colleges and universities (though the federal government may be through Pell grants, student loans, and federally funded work-study, programs that private, for-profit colleges and universities appear to qualify for, and that for some appear to represent the majority of their revenue). Citing total enrollment rather than public college and university enrollment in a discussion of why public college and university costs are rising strikes me as incredibly sloppy at best, intellectually dishonest at worst.
Just go read the data yourself.
http://www.sheeo.org/resources/publications/shef-%E2%80%94-state-higher-education-finance-fy14
Here’s the data for Virginia, which is often criticized for backing away from higher ed.
State support for public education in 2000 was $1.48 billion on enrollment of 233,236.
In 2014, $1.78 billion on enrollment of 318,166.
Cheers!
I’ve worked at public institutions in two states, and in both states the investment for graduate and professional programs was higher on a per-student basis. Yes, tuition was higher for the students, but that didn’t necessarily reflect a lower state investment in post-graduate education—graduate and professional education is simply more expensive to do properly than undergrad education is.
Total state spending in FY 1990 was $510 billion. By FY 2013 total state spending had grown to $1.65 trillion, more than a threefold increase in nominal dollars. So it’s not surprising that in nominal dollars, states spend more on public higher education now than in 1990. But that masks what’s really going on here.
According to the National Association of State Budget Officers (NASBO), the states collectively spent 34% of their general fund budgets on K-12 education in FY 1990, and 15% on public higher education.
By FY 2013, the share of state general fund budgets going to K-12 education had actually increased slightly to 34.9%, while the share going to public higher education shrank to 9.4%. This, despite the fact that enrollment in public colleges and universities increased much faster than enrollment in K-12 schools (+43.9% in public colleges and universities, +21.5% in public K-12 schools between 1990 and 2013).
According to NCES data, the biggest increase in public college and university enrollment since the 1970s began around 2000, when the first of the “echo boomers” began entering college. (Most definitions of “echo boomers” identify the birth year 1982 as the beginning of the echo boom or “millennial” generation). In the decade between 1990 and 2000, enrollment in public colleges and universities increased by a modest 8.5%, less than the growth rate of the nation’s overall population in that decade (12.6%). But as the echo boomers began arriving on campus in the decade between 2000 and 2010, public college and university enrollment swelled by 25.4%.
NCES data also allow us to trace this demographic bulge up the educational ladder. Total K-12 enrollment held more or less constant between 1980 and 1990, increasing only 1.4% during this period; but enrollment in grades 9-12 actually shrank by 8.6% during that decade, while enrollment in pre-K through grade 8 increased by 8.7% as echo boomers began entering school roughly midway through the decade. Total K-12 enrollment jumped by a robust 13.9% in the next decade, between 1990 and 2000—fully echo boom years—while high school (9-12) enrollment grew by an eye-popping 18.5% in that decade as echo boomers filled the high school classrooms. Through it all, state governments largely kept faith with the echo boom generation, increasing state support for K-12 education as the echo boomers proceeded through grade school, then high school. Until the echo boomers got to college, and at that point the states essentially said, “Well, now you’re on your own; we’ll continue to provide more or less the funds we’ve been providing, but nothing more to reflect the larger population of college students our public colleges and universities now need to serve.” And it’s at that point that state funding of public higher education went into a steep decline on a per-student basis, and as a percentage of overall state spending, even as state aid to K-12 education kept pace with rising state budgets despite extremely slow growth in K-12 enrollment since 2000 (a modest 2.8% increase in K-12 enrollment between 2000 and 2010, and virtually no growth since then).
@northwesty, (post #165),
Both Virginia and Michigan began disinvesting in public higher education long before 2000. That’s why the public flagships in those two states are so far down the road toward quasi-privatization.
Virginia has also had robust population growth since 2000. Michigan hasn’t. But look at the continuing disinvestment trend in Michigan: in 2000, the state spent $1.988 billion on public higher education. By 2005, that had fallen to $1.861 billion. By 2013 it was down to $1.609 billion, before bouncing back slightly to $1.670 billion in 2014. These are very substantial cuts, and they’re expressed in nominal dollars. Expressed in real dollars, the cuts would be even deeper.
Pennsylvania is another state that has made actual cuts, $1.648 billion in 2000, rising to $1.983 billion in 2009 before cutting to $1.389 billion in 2013, and finally bouncing back slightly to $1.406 billion in 2014. Also Ohio, $2,171 billion in 2000, falling to $1.969 billion in 2013 and rebounding a bit to $2.028 billion in 2014.
And even in Virginia, there hasn’t been a steady upward march of state spending on public higher education. It reached a high water mark of $1.828 billion in 2011 before being slashed to $1.541 billion the very next year. The 2014 figure of $1.688 billion represents a partial restoration of that deep cut.
Again, that’s why it’s so misleading to look at aggregate figures for all states. There’s huge variation among the states on this.
“Both Virginia and Michigan began disinvesting in public higher education long before 2000. That’s why the public flagships in those two states are so far down the road toward quasi-privatization.”
The data does not show that.
“Between FY94 and FY02, Virginia increased its support of higher education by 72%. This increase allowed Virginia to attain levels of support comparable to those achieved in FY90 on national measures of higher education support per capita and support per $1,000 income, and Virginia ranked 4th in largest increases in general fund support to higher education nationally in this period.”
http://www.schev.edu/Reportstats/ConditionOfFundingReport052003.pdf?from=
Overall, states did not actually reduce/cut their funding until the great recession in 2009. Current funding in most places is back to where it was pre-GR.
What actually happened is that during the 2000s states slowed down or stopped the rate of increase in the level of support. You can call that a “cut” if you want. But the dollars did not get withdrawn or go down.
During that time colleges enrollments went up (echo boomers as BC points out) and college budgets went up even more. Federal funds going to colleges went up, making up for the increased dollars that the states did not send. And tuition went way up too.
The state money didn’t get small. The state university budget and enrollment got bigger.
Remember, the figures you’re citing from the SHEEO data are nominal dollars, not real dollars. In real, inflation-adjusted dollars, $100 in 1990 would be worth $184.81 in 2014. So the “increase” in state aid to public higher education you’re citing for Virginia, from $1.48 billion in 1990 to $1.78 billion in 2014, didn’t even come close to keeping pace with inflation. It would have required annual state support of $2.73 billion in 2014 to equal the same purchasing power as $1.48 billion in 1990. Measured in real dollars, that’s a cut. Notwithstanding dramatically higher college enrollments, which only compounds the problem.
In many states, the legislatures are expecting state colleges and universities to fulfill their traditional mission of educating anyone in the state who qualifies for and wants to attend college—a bigger and more demanding and more expensive job than ever, given growing demand–on declining state support measured in real terms. In other states, total state support has been held more or less constant (again measured in real terms) despite rising enrollments, resulting in sharp reductions in real per-student state aid. In some other states, the total amount of state aid has actually increased in real dollars, but not as fast as growth in enrollment. And perhaps there are even a few states—but I’m sure not many–where state spending on higher education has kept up with, or even exceeded, growth in enrollment. But again I think it’s a serious mistake to lump together all these conflicting trends and say that “on average” or “in the aggregate” states are doing this or that. That’s like taking 4 runners and sending one east, one west, one north, and one south, and saying that on average they’re not going anywhere.
Misleading. As per capita state support has declined in real terms (and in many states even in nominal dollars), public colleges and universities have had no choice but to raise tuition. It’s true that federal financial aid has helped some students pay that increased tuition, but most of that “generous” federal aid comes in the form of student debt. So not only are students forced to pay much higher tuition, but also unprecedented numbers of them are saddled with unprecedented amounts of student loan debt, even as they enter a job market that remains much weaker for newly minted college graduates than in previous generations. You can choose to look at all this with rose-colored glasses if you like and convince yourself there’s not a problem here. I think most of the world will simply disagree with you.
BC – come on. The math is simple.
“Virginia and Michigan began disinvesting in public higher education long before 2000. That’s why the public flagships in those two states are so far down the road toward quasi-privatization.”
“Between FY94 and FY02, Virginia increased its support of higher education by 72%. This increase allowed Virginia to attain levels of support comparable to those achieved in FY90 on national measures of higher education support per capita and support per $1,000 income, and Virginia ranked 4th in largest increases in general fund support to higher education nationally in this period.”
http://www.schev.edu/Reportstats/ConditionOfFundingReport052003.pdf?from=
VA’s outlays went up 72% over this period. Inflation over that same period was 21%. The spending increase greatly exceeded the rate of inflation.
The dollars did not get small. The cost and popularity public universities got really big.
BC – all of this is in 2014 constant dollars.
https://public.tableau.com/profile/publish/SHEFInteractiveStateData/AbouttheData#!/publish-confirm
In 1990, VA spent $7,886 per student when enrollment was 211, 007. Call that $1.66 billion.
In 2014, VA spent $4,779 per student when enrollment was 318,166. Call that $1.52 billion.
The state money did not get small. The cost and popularity of public universities got big.
The claim has never been simply that states have been defunding public universities, though—it’s that they’ve been defunding public universities in **real/b terms.
Post #172 demonstrates this quite nicely, really.
Also, one bit of context for thought: A university’s increased enrollment may actually result from legislative mandates (or mandates from legislatively-appointed boards), even as that same legislature has simultaneously reduced per-student spending (sometimes while providing themselves the fig leaf of increased spending in non-per-student terms). No idea if Virginia faced that, but many others certainly have.
Uva state funding has gone from $165M in 2002/03 to $144M for 2015/16 in nominal $$s. And it was lower in that interval. Enrollment is up some too.
UVa and Tech were under pressure by the state to increase their enrollments a few years ago (particularly for STEM fields). UVa said they would, in gradual phases, if the State increased its funding so that the State funding per in-state student remained level. I don’t believe the state kept their side of the agreement.
Fortunately, UVa has generous alumni and a much larger endowment per student than other public universities (its enrollment is half the size of most other major flagships)…
“The claim has never been simply that states have been defunding public universities, though—it’s that they’ve been defunding public universities in real (i.e., per-student) terms.”
That is exactly the claim that is made constantly and everywhere.
Have you ever seen as story that said “States are continuing to spend just as much or more on higher ed today as they did 25 years ago”? I haven’t.
I actually thought that the State U I attended (UVA) was being cut off by the Commonwealth. That’s the only thing I could conclude when reading all the stuff UVA sends me about how state support has been “cut” so much and the Commonwealth has so greatly disinvested that state support is now down to a single digit percentage of UVA’s budget. Based on all that, I started giving a bit more each year (although my donations are small time).
Turns out that the percentage of budget got small because UVA’s budget got extremely big. There’s been some amount of enrollment gain. But the bigger factor by far is that UVA’s costs have been swelling like crazy.
The whole story is always how the states have cut back. Once you look at the actual data, it becomes obvious that the story told by the schools is incredibly misleading. It actually nicked me off a lot when I took the time to figure it out. I still give to UVA (but somewhat reduced) and stopped giving to my home State U.
@ northwesty, C’mon, buddy, let’s have some straight talk here, shall we? In post #169 and again in post #171 you cherry-picked about the only sentence in the May 2003 report you link to that is favorable to Virginia’s higher education funding policies, because it focuses on a short (8-year) period of economic boom times in Virginia when the legislature felt compelled to make up for past budget cuts by increasing appropriations to state universities—before again slashing appropriations just after the end of that 8-year period. The rest of the document, focusing on a longer 15-year period, tells an unrelenting tale of lurching policy reversals, broken promises, and bad faith by the state legislature. Virginia appears to be a state where the legislature controls not only general fund appropriations to public universities, but also the universities’ tuition policies. Every time there’s an economic downturn, the legislature cynically decides to balance the state budget on the backs of college students and their parents by cutting state appropriations to higher education, and letting the colleges make up the shortfall by raising tuition. As the document points out, this means that “students and their families have been required to pay more to help institutions offset state budget reductions during the economic difficult times when they can least afford to pay.” (p. 38). Then, when the economy recovers and the state has more tax revenue, the legislature (partially) restores higher education appropriations and (no doubt accompanied by a lot of cheap-shot populist rhetoric attacking the universities for raising tuition, as the legislature itself practically begged them to do), the legislature freezes tuition, or in one case actually ordered a 20% tuition rollback. Then the economy has another downturn, as it inevitably does, and the cycle is repeated. As a result, “Such erratic practice lacks continuity and predictability of funding needs, limited students [sic] and their family’s [sic] ability to save effectively for college, and did not provide equity for taxpayers in terms of cost share of education.” (p. 38)
More specifically, if you look at the institution-specific, inflation-adjusted general fund support documented in Appendix A (p. 45), you’ll see that state appropriations to the University of Virginia (UVA) declined from $169.97 million in FY 1988-89 to $106.17 million in FY 2003-04—a 36.7% cut over that period. It’s true that some institutions saw real growth in state support over that same period, due in part perhaps to rising enrollment at those institutions but almost certainly in part due to the vagaries of legislative politics, i.e., political favoritism. But overall, 4-year Virginia public institutions incurred a 15.0% reduction in state general fund support over this period, measured in real dollars. Community colleges did better with only a 3.2% real reduction, but overall, Virginia public institutions incurred a 12.3% reduction in state general fund support over this 15-year period, measured in inflation-adjusted dollars. And this is not per-student reductions; the real cuts in total appropriations are compounded by a substantial growth in student enrollment over the same period.
Don’t be fooled by the following part of the table showing “Nongeneral Fund Appropriations.” As the tex of the document makes clear, Virginia is one of a number of states that count public university tuition revenue as state revenue, and the portion of tuition revenue retained by the universities as a “non-general fund appropriation.” This table shows “non-general fund appropriations” to UVA increasing by 75.3% during the 15-year period from FY 1988-89 to FY 2003-04, but that just means UVA was compelled to raise tuition to make up for the budget shortfall occasioned by deep cuts in general fund legislative appropriations.
I’d encourage you to read more carefully, northwesty, because if your radical mischaracterization of this document isn’t the result of sloppy reading, I would need to attribute it to intellectual dishonesty. And I don’t want to go there.
For reference, here’s the report northwesty cited:
http://www.schev.edu/Reportstats/ConditionOfFundingReport052003.pdf?from=
One more thing, which #177 points out in passing: The up-and-down nature of the funding creates problems for public universities, as well. It wrecks the ability to do competent long-term planning,* or when there actually manages to be decent long-term planning it wrecks the ability to carry it out properly.
The report above about Virginia colleges is from 2003. I posted a couple of links in #120 about the restructuring of Virginia universities that took place in 2005. I had two kids in Virginia public schools for 8 years straight- 2005 to 2013. Some of the schools do have very generous alumni and that seems to be an additional funding source . For example, UVa has the John Paul Jones Arena and Virginia Tech has the new Goodwin Hall Signature Engineering Building. Both named after very generous alumni.