Abstract
The single most important issue impacting our public-college leaders is state disinvestment. Nationwide since 1981, state appropriations for public higher education are down approximately 48 percent in “tax effort,” which measures a state’s education spending by per-capita personal income. The decline is precipitous and consistent. In fact, when adjusting for inflation, more than 22 states are spending less on public higher education than they did in 1991. When analyzing state tax investments during the same period, spending on public higher education has decreased as a share of the state budget from 14 percent to 9 percent overall and has declined in all but two states (Tennessee and North Carolina). Medicaid, on the other hand, has effectively supplanted public higher education, increasing from 11 percent to 18 percent of state budgets and has increased in nearly every state.
