State Support Slumps Again

Doug Lederman, Inside Higher Ed

The news will come as no surprise to the public college administrators and faculty members who’ve seen their budgets slashed over the past year. But an annual study of state spending on higher education finds that state appropriations for colleges and students sunk by 7.6 percent in 2011-12, the largest such decline in at least a half century.

The annual Grapevine study, conducted by the Illinois State University Center for the Study of Higher Education and the State Higher Education Executive Officers, finds that all but nine states experienced one-year declines from their 2010-11 totals. The 41 states that cut their spending did so by widely varying proportions, from as little as 1 percent (in Indiana and North Carolina) to as much as 41 percent (New Hampshire), with a full third seeing double-digit drops (see table below).

The declines, which were driven heavily by the depletion of federal funds from the 2009 stimulus legislation, leave many state higher education systems in significantly worse shape than they were in before the economic downturn began. Twenty-nine states allocated less money to higher education in 2011-12 than they did in 2006-7, and nearly half — 14 — provided at least 10 percent less than they did five years ago. More…

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