US public universities refute claim they are amply funded

Entering the new academic year, US public colleges and universities are fighting a new round of criticisms that they are fuelling the nation’s debt crisis by charging too much in tuition fees.

As the Biden administration outlines yet another student-loan forgiveness option, analyses by conservative-oriented outlets have been arguing that US states have not actually been cutting their funding for higher education, and that growth in tuition charges instead reflects campus mismanagement.

“Colleges are well funded, as least relative to the past,” said an author of one of the data reviews, Andrew Gillen, a senior policy analyst at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Claims that higher education is underfunded should be met with scepticism.”

The foundation has calculated that state funding overall in the US has increased over the past four decades, despite routine claims to the contrary from higher education leaders. A separate numerical assessment by The Wall Street Journal blamed state flagship institutions for hurting students by overspending.

The critiques have been generating pushback from higher education leaders and analysts, who have pointed to data showing that state funding has fallen by measures that include share of state revenue and per-student expenditures; that fees have risen only marginally compared with inflation and have even dropped in many places; and that many institutions need to confront overdue maintenance demands, salary pressures in a personnel-heavy sector and sharpening competition for wealthier students.

The criticisms are partly a function of the many choices underlying data presentation, said Thomas Harnisch, the vice-president for government relations at the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. “It’s just different ways of viewing what indices should be used,” Dr Harnisch said.

But universities also face chronic difficulties in getting the public to appreciate the complexities and costs of their operations, he said, exacerbated by the growing practice of setting high sticker prices and then offering exaggerated discounts based on need and other factors.

That political pressure is only being compounded as the Biden administration keeps announcing new student loan forgiveness plans. The administration had already cancelled more than $116 billion (£91 billion) in student loan debt for 3.4 million Americans, before it announced on 22 August that it would give 20 million borrowers an average cut in their debts of 40 per cent.

Republican lawmakers have railed against such programmes as unfair impositions on taxpayers, while blaming institutions for creating the problem by charging too much money. The chairman of the Education Committee in the US House of Representatives, Virginia Foxx, has repeatedly urged action to stem “the tide of rising college costs”.

In response to criticisms of the Texas Public Policy Foundation analysis, Dr Gillen said he agreed that there were many methods of measuring state support for higher education. “There are a lot of legitimate ways to approach this,” he said. But citing absolute levels of state funding was more accurate than viewing that amount as a percentage of state revenues because revenues could vary so much, Dr Gillen said.

One expert who has been rebutting the critiques of higher education spending, Robert Toutkoushian, a professor of higher education at the University of Georgia, said comparisons to state revenue provide important context. But even straight-dollar measures of state spending on higher education show little if any growth across the US in recent decades, for a sector that faces unusually difficult structural demands.

Another expert, David Feldman, a professor of economics at William & Mary, noted that state flagship universities were in a particularly difficult bind. They must try to compete with elite private institutions and industry while living under the constraints of public support, he said, citing as an example his department losing a promising young economist when the commerce giant Amazon offered to double his salary.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com