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State spending on higher education in the 2022 fiscal year increased from the previous year — fueled, in part, by some states’ reversal of the funding cuts they made during the pandemic-induced recession, according to a report released on Tuesday.
The annual Grapevine report, a joint project of the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, shows that state support for higher education in 2022, excluding federal stimulus money, was up 8.5 percent over the previous year.
The report, which provides a first look at state higher-education funding in the current fiscal year, sheds light on the evolving fiscal dynamics and public-policy response to Covid-19. The early predictions were that the pandemic would wreak havoc on public-college budgets, but billions of dollars in federal coronavirus relief served as a backstop for many institutions. Now, as the report makes clear, states are stepping up.
“States had better-than-projected state revenues,” and some states increased funding for higher education this year, said Sophia Laderman, senior policy analyst at the association. “States recognized higher education is important, and it was prioritized more than in the past.”
Indeed, when factoring federal stimulus funding into the calculation, 18 states reported a decline in support for higher education from the year before. The report attributes that decline to the reduction in federal money, not a change in state support. In 2021, higher education received the bulk of the federal stimulus funds that had been allocated to it through the states.
When federal stimulus money is excluded, only five states saw a decline in funding for higher education: Alaska, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Wyoming. Wyoming’s 10-percent decrease, the report says, was concentrated among its four-year colleges, which had a 17-percent drop in their state appropriations in the 2022 fiscal year.
The true extent of this year’s gains may be offset, though. The figures in the Grapevine report aren’t adjusted for inflation, which will probably account for most of the increase in support, said Laderman, the report’s project leader.
The report also provides a longer-term look at state support. Excluding federal stimulus money, seven states — Alaska, Georgia, Hawaii, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, and Wyoming — reported lower state support in 2022 than in 2020. Only four states had lower state support in 2022 than in 2017: Alaska, Mississippi, North Dakota, and Wyoming.
Overall state spending on higher education has increased 9.7 percent since 2020, excluding federal stimulus funding. Since 2017, state support has increased by 21.4 percent.
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