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Tag: State Higher Education Executive Officers Association

  • State Support for Higher Ed Continues to Rise. Yet Public Colleges Still Face Headwinds.

    State Support for Higher Ed Continues to Rise. Yet Public Colleges Still Face Headwinds.

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    While enrollment is down at the nation’s public colleges, state funding for higher ed is up — and students have been footing less of the bill for their education over the last four years.

    State and local support for higher ed increased nearly 5 percent in the 2022 fiscal year, according to the latest State Higher Education Finance report, published on Thursday by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. States allocated more money for higher education both in the form of financial aid, which increased 2 percent, and general public operations, which increased 7 percent. (The report adjusted those proportions for inflation.)

    The SHEF report, released annually since 2003, is a data set detailing state and local funding for both two- and four-year higher-education institutions, as well as tuition revenue and enrollment. The association measures state support and net tuition revenue per student by considering enrollment on the basis of full-time-equivalent students, or FTE.

    The growth in higher-ed funding since the pandemic-related economic downturn of 2020 bucks a historical trend, according to the report. Recessions traditionally lead to lower state support for public higher education, which prompts colleges to raise tuition and other costs for students.

    In the 2022 fiscal year, the “student share” — which the association defines as the percentage of total revenue that comes from tuition for each full-time student — decreased in 32 states and Washington, D.C. In Connecticut, Kansas, Louisiana, and New Jersey, the student share has fallen below 50 percent of total revenue in each of the last five years.

    The report’s authors, Kelsey Kunkle and Sophia Laderman, attributed that trend to three factors: the national enrollment decline, increasing commitments at the state-government level to higher-education funding, and some federal stimulus money given to states for higher education during the pandemic.

    Still, Kunkle told The Chronicle, students’ tuition and fees continue to make up far more of public colleges’ revenue — nearly 42 percent — than in 1980, when that share was just 21 percent.

    Robert Kelchen, a professor in the department of educational leadership and policy studies at University of Tennessee at Knoxville who studies higher-education finance with a focus on state funding, said the report is significant because states and colleges often use it as a barometer with which to compare one another.

    “There have been states and universities that use this to try to advocate for more funding,” he said. “And then there are some states that try to match their peers.”

    Here are three other key takeaways from this year’s report.

    Some states are reinvesting in higher ed, but others are still cutting.

    States’ higher-ed funding over all has recovered to levels not seen since before the 2008 recession. In 28 states, however, the funding remains lower than it was before 2008. From 2008 to 2018, public-college funding dropped 9.1 percent.

    Finances have generally begun to recover from pandemic pressures, Kunkle said. “State budgets were hurting in 2021, but they’ve gotten a bit better,” she said.

    State financial aid, which accounted for nearly 10 percent of all higher-ed appropriations, was at a high of $990 per full-time student in 2022.

    The state with the largest funding increase was Nevada, with a 27-percent jump — in part due to money in the federal appropriations bill that passed Congress in March 2022. It contained $22 million for Nevada public colleges.

    The largest decrease, at more than 28 percent, was in Wyoming, whose Legislature cut $31.3 million in June 2021 from the University of Wyoming, the largest higher-ed institution in the state and the only public four-year college.

    Nationally, public-college revenue per full-time student — from both state appropriations and net tuition revenue — totaled $17,393, another record high. But the trend doesn’t hold in most of the country; only 11 states hit record highs.

    Federal pandemic relief provided one last windfall.

    State and local funding for higher education totaled $120.7 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, with $2.5 billion — or about 2 percent — coming from federal stimulus money. In the future, colleges won’t be able to count on that support: Pandemic-relief funding has nearly run out.

    Thirty-nine states used some stimulus funding for higher education in 2022, according to the report.

    The money both covered general state costs from the pandemic, preventing higher education from taking a hit from spending in other budget areas, and raised operating appropriations for higher education.

    Some states … are already feeling a fiscal cliff now that federal stimulus is waning.

    In Vermont, more than 42 percent of state appropriations for higher education came from federal stimulus money. In the previous year, both Vermont and Colorado used federal stimulus dollars for around half of their higher-education appropriations, but this year Colorado returned to regular state funding.

    “We’re really trying to hit home that it’s really important for states to prioritize and continue committing to funding higher education,” Kunkle said. “Because right now we do have some states that are already feeling a fiscal cliff now that federal stimulus is waning.”

    Enrollment challenges will be a long-term problem for public higher ed.

    From 2021 to 2022, public-college enrollment declined 2.5 percent, the second-largest decrease since 1980. The year before, public higher ed experienced a 3-percent drop.

    The report emphasizes that the bleeding is worse at community colleges. Net tuition revenue declined 7 percent at two-year institutions, compared with a fraction of 1 percent at four-year institutions in the last year.

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    Helen Huiskes

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  • What Does It Take to Be a ‘Minority-Serving Institution’?

    What Does It Take to Be a ‘Minority-Serving Institution’?

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    A group of researchers has recommended a new classification system for minority-serving institutions that they hope will ultimately direct more money to colleges that are serving minority students well, and not just enrolling them in large numbers.

    The MSI Data Project, the researchers said in a news release Sunday, is a response to “inaccurate and inconsistent data used to identify minority-serving institutions (MSIs) for funding and analysis.”

    “Our hope is … for MSI leaders, advocates, and policymakers to use this body of research, as well as our data dashboards, to make better informed decisions that promote equitable educational outcomes for students,” said Mike Hoa Nguyen, the principal investigator and an assistant professor of education at New York University.

    The data project, launched this month, examines 11 categories of minority-serving institutions. It includes dashboards that detail individual campuses’ eligibility for federal funds, institutional characteristics, enrollment, and graduation metrics over a five-year period, from 2017 to 2021.

    For instance, the dashboard shows, 219 Hispanic-serving institutions received funding from the U.S. Department of Education in 2021, but 462 were eligible for such money. Colleges still have to apply for competitive grants from a limited pool of money. Some applied and were denied, while other colleges may not have even known they were eligible.

    The researchers hope their recommendations will spur changes in how colleges are designated as MSIs and clear up confusion about who should be able to claim that status, and the federal money that can come with it.

    In an accompanying article in Educational Researcher, titled “What Counts as a Minority-Serving Institution?” Nguyen and two of the project’s co-creators raise the concern that federal money isn’t necessarily going to the most deserving institutions.

    “For example, perhaps an institution, not identified as an MSI under the federal statute, is found to serve students of color much better than those that are identified. Such findings could offer important suggestions for policy changes. Additionally, if institutions are receiving federal MSI funds but are not serving students of color well, this would be an important consideration to amend practices and policies so that federal funding is used in the manner in which it was intended.”

    “The MSI landscape is so unbelievably complex, in the way all 11 designations were created over a long period of time, using a patchwork legislative process,” Nguyen said in an interview. By getting everyone “speaking the same language” in how they examine minority-serving institutions, “our hope is that we can find out how well those students are being served” by the federal money set aside and where equity gaps exist.

    Nguyen’s fellow authors were Joseph J. Ramirez, an institutional research and assessment associate at the California Institute of Technology, and Sophia Laderman, an associate vice president at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO).

    About one in five postsecondary institutions are eligible for federal money as MSIs, but more than half of all undergraduate students of color attend these colleges, the authors wrote. President Biden has pledged significant increases in the amount of money directed toward minority-serving institutions.

    Researchers, including Gina Ann Garcia, an associate professor of educational foundations, organizations, and policy at the University of Pittsburgh, have pointed out that the nation’s demographic changes have resulted in hundreds of campuses being designated as Hispanic serving based on numbers alone. The data-project researchers acknowledge that some colleges engage in “the strategic manipulation of enrollment trends in order to meet eligibility requirements.”

    Hispanic-serving institutions, which were first designated by the federal government in 1994, are among the minority-serving institutions that get that designation based on share of enrollment. For HSIs, the threshold is 25 percent of the undergraduate population.

    By contrast, Historically Black and Tribal-Serving colleges achieve that designation based on their histories and missions. Colleges that weren’t designated in those categories can’t join their ranks, regardless of their own changing demographics. That has caused longstanding tensions between Historically Black and predominantly Black institutions over who should have access to the federal money set aside for minority-serving institutions.

    Among the minority-serving institutions the database tracks are those representing Hispanic students, Asian American and Pacific Islanders, both tribal and non-tribally-controlled Native American colleges, and colleges that are either Historically Black or predominantly Black.

    Many colleges are designated in more than one category, but they may only be able to receive funding under one. Designating their multiple identities is important, the authors write, because it “recognizes the diversity and complexity of the institution, and does not render invisible the students of color who attend that institution.”

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    Katherine Mangan

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  • When Campuses Close, Most of Their Students Are Stuck Without the Credentials They Wanted

    When Campuses Close, Most of Their Students Are Stuck Without the Credentials They Wanted

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    Nearly three-quarters of the students whose colleges closed between 2004 and 2020 were stranded without adequate warning or plans to help them finish their degrees, and fewer than half of those students ended up re-enrolling in any postsecondary programs, according to a report released Tuesday.

    Hardest hit were Black and Hispanic students enrolled in for-profit institutions. “Their schools’ closing effectively closed the doors on the students’ educational dreams,” Doug Shapiro, executive director of the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, said in a briefing with reporters.

    The research center worked with the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, also known as SHEEO, on a series of three reports that will examine the impact of college closures on students and how states can better protect those whose education plans are disrupted.

    The first report, “A Dream Derailed? Investigating the Impacts of College Closure on Student Outcomes,” found that between July 2004 and June 2020, 467 colleges closed in the U.S. — representing the loss of some 12,000 campuses across the country. Nearly half were private, for-profit, two-year colleges.

    For 70 percent of the 143,000 students affected, the colleges shut their doors abruptly, without adequate notice or teach-out plans to help students finish their degrees or other credentials.

    A 2019 Chronicle analysis found that many of those whose lives have been plunged into chaos by campus closures were working adults living paycheck to paycheck. College, to them, was a way to provide enough money to support families and attain a middle-class lifestyle.

    Instead, they’ve joined the ranks of the more than 36 million Americans with some college and no degree, a population that has grown during the Covid-19 pandemic. Colleges that are struggling to maintain their enrollments are stepping up efforts to find and re-enroll many of them.

    “This study shows that any college closure is damaging to student success, leaving too many learners — more than half — without a viable path to fulfilling their educational dreams,“ Shapiro said in a prepared statement. “But the extremely poor outcomes for students who experienced abrupt closures are particularly worrisome.”

    The findings reinforce the need to strengthen how states monitor higher-education institutions to “prevent, prepare for, and respond to college closures,” Rob Anderson, president of SHEEO, said in a prepared statement.

    The colleges most likely to close — for-profit institutions — serve disproportionately large numbers of students of color, veterans, and adult students with children.

    In upcoming reports, the researchers will look at how students fared in states that offer more, or less, protection for stranded students.

    The study reinforced the need for states to do a better job monitoring the financial health of colleges, the report notes. “Once it becomes likely an institution will close, states need to ensure teach-out agreements are in place to provide all students with a pathway for completing their credentials,” it says.

    Financially struggling colleges should plan ahead to find colleges willing to take on their students, and the credits they’ve earned, if they close their doors, the researchers said. In a few extreme examples, students showed up for classes to find doors locked and no way for them to retrieve records of the classes they had taken.

    Students whose for-profit campuses have closed often re-enroll in another branch of the same college, which often then also closes, the researchers said. They’d be better going with “an outside partner who’s not going to be struggling with the same financial-viability factors,” Rachel Burns, a senior policy analyst at SHEEO, said during the briefing.

    Students who re-enrolled in college within four months of a campus closure were the most likely to earn a credential, and their odds of doing so doubled if they re-enrolled within a year, the report found. Students who were younger, white, and female were the most likely to re-enroll; of students who did re-enroll after their campuses closed, 38 percent received a postsecondary credential.

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    Katherine Mangan

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