No, your eyes aren’t fooling you, we’re witnessing an unprecedented rotation away from public higher education – one that has only gathered steam since The Great Recession. Setting aside political rhetoric around “free” college, this is what’s actually been occurring.
According to the Pell Institute, state funding efforts for public higher education today stand at 55 percent of what they were in 1980.
That’s a serious pullback impacting hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Although the link isn’t made clear in this article, it is no doubt one significant contributor to dramatically escalating student loan debt, over $1.2 trillion (yes, with a T) the last time we looked.
You may be asking yourself, “But with The Great Recession supposedly behind us, shouldn’t public funding be increasing once again?” Excellent question! The answer, unfortunately, is a bit shocking:
According to an analysis of state higher education funding efforts from the Pell Institute, extending trend lines from 1980 indicate that when children born this year graduate high school, six states will have reduced funding to zero, a number that increases to 13 states for children born five years from now. Nationally, the Pell Institute projects the trend line to hit zero in 2058.
That’s right, the authors expect that within the lifetime of today’s undergraduates publicly funded higher education will cease to exist. Full stop.
There has long been an unwritten social contract between the states and their residents under which states agree to provide affordable public higher education opportunities in exchange for taxes. A number of states are actually explicit in this commitment (see the constitutions of Arizona, North Carolina and Wyoming). In a total disinvestment scenario, the states’ implicit guarantee of access would be repudiated at the point when families would seek to take advantage of a benefit they assumed their tax dollars would make available to them.
There is no discussion herein, by the way, about a commensurate reduction in state taxes (e.g., property, income, sales, vehicle, etc.) that would correspond with the reduced benefits offered to taxpayers so clearly something is amiss. The logical, if not satisfying endgame as the author sees it:
Public higher education in America has long been a decentralized affair by virtue of the nation’s careful division of political authority between the federal government and the states. The state-federal financing distribution has helped insulate public institutions from inappropriate political interference with curriculum and instruction. As federal aid replaces state funding, the question will be the extent to which the federal government controls public colleges and universities and the implications for students, institutions and states. If current trends continue, a federal takeover of public higher education will arrive—just quietly and through the backdoor.
Emphasis ours. We believe access, affordability, and efficient completion matter. We also believe that dedicated instructors are a linchpin in driving gains in completion rates and degree attainment. Unlike other adaptive courseware companies, we don’t believe in replacing instructors, but instead believe in augmenting their reach and supporting them to make their lives more efficient so they can spend less time shuffling and organizing content and more time engaging in valuable learning moments with their students.
If you haven’t tried out Junction yet, drop us a line and let’s chat about how we may be able to work together to help your campus preserve equal access and affordability.
Trending to Zero: The Lasting Impact of Total State Disinvestment from Public Higher Education
