The State Education Performance Funding

Measuring Up: The National Report on Higher Education stated in 2006: “Texas’ under-performance in educating its young population could limit the state’s access to a competitive workforce and weaken its economy over time.” Yet in the intervening years, Texas leaders have done nothing to reverse this downward trend, instead slashing scholarships and other resources even further.

The topic of this paper is the states’ decreasing financial support of higher education, the reaction and response from institutions who have lost funding, and the creative ways public institutions are locating additional streams of revenue. States have been the primary backer of public institutions, but since the recession states have shown less commitment financially while still heavily regulating higher education. As a result some institutions have had to change their practices while others have challenged their state’s regulations all together. Many have speculated that state funding may never return to its former highs. Rather than make an enemy of the state, some schools have discovered new and unconvential ways of raising funds for their institution.

Abstract: This paper will discuss the Federal Pell Grant and the legislation behind it as well as the Higher Education Act of 1965 and it’s reforms since then. This appears purpose is to show the faults within these programs and to then show possible ways people have tried to reform it. The final part of this paper will be my opinion on how the legislation can be fixed along with using data and information from recent research done on the subject. It is the hopes that these recommendations will then be used to further stabilize this piece of legislation in the future.

College is a head turner, eye catcher, and attention grabber. From making the decision to even attend to selecting the perfect school, the whole experience turns out to be incredibly stressful and multiple aspects go into what seems simple at first glance. The cost of attending college is on the rise. Parents and students anxiously await scholarship letters to help with these rising costs of education. State schools usually offer a financial advantage, but a new “law” is being proposed - free in-state college tuition to those students with a 3.5 GPA or higher. Few benefits are available and numerous disadvantages are present when it comes to this recently produced regulation. A few negative factors in this situation will be covered and the explanations will go into depth to prove that this idea is too good to be true. Even though the conception of free college is enticing, the cons outweigh the pros.

Only four students went straight to the workforce, when a century ago, this was not the case. With students now consistently going straight to college after high school, state universities should be free to state residents since we have public high schools. In Kalamazoo, Michigan, students who attend high school in Kalamazoo starting in ninth grade, can have from sixty-five to one hundred percent of their tuition covered (Teicher). This is known as “The Promise.” The Promise guarantees any student from Kalamazoo a scholarship that pays either a majority or all of their tuition (Teicher). This scholarship can be used for any state school, fifteen private schools, and other state schools around the United States that are less than the highest tuition in Michigan (Teicher). Since The Promise’s first wave of scholarships, there has been definite improvements in college attendance. For black students, there has been a three percent rise in college attendance and overall forty-eight percent of scholarship recipients graduate college (Teicher). While this has shown an impact, there certainly are other factors that lead to the fifty-two percent that do not graduate, such as not being taught time management, academic skills, or how to take advantage of their sources (Teicher). Despite this fallback, “The Promise” has definitely started an era of higher college graduation rates and those who lack financial support a method of

Financial barriers for higher education has climbed over the last ten years. Today, over 40 million Americans have student loans. Of these 40 million, most individuals are struggling to maintain payments on the loans (Hillary for America, 2016). Since 2004, the tuition for in-state colleges and universities has risen by about 42 percent and with the recent Great Recession, states have continued to decrease spending on higher education at a rapid rate (Hillary for America, 2016). It is estimated that states are only contributing around $1,805 per student, which is estimated to be 20 percent less than what was contributed only seven years’ prior. The federal government in

Every year, higher education institutions (HEI’s) receive billions of dollars from the Department of Education in the form of loans, grants and subsidies. These funds are authorized under Title IV of the Higher Education Act, and are the primary source of Federal student aid for all HEI’s in the United States. The main Title IV programs include Loans, Grants and Federal Work Study (U.S. Government Accountability Office [GAO], 2009).

A surging $1.2 trillion in student debt and rising rapidly in tuition is the critical issue America public universities face today. These student debts and rising tuitions are caused mainly by administrative hiring and pay or expensive building projects on campuses. When public universities are spending money toward expensive building projects, this does not help with making tuition cheap to attend a certain university, instead it’s high.

This journal article written by William Zumeta in April, 1992, is an extensive argument to suggest state policymakers would be wise to conduct research to maintain healthy colleges and universities to address the increasing demands of demographics and economics at state level. In addition, Zumeta suggests the private sector should be included more in state planning and addresses the effects of the public sector tuition policies. According to Zumeta, “The goal of state policy in higher education after all must be to serve the broader public interest as fully as possible with limited resources.” Although this journal article is dated, Zumeta and his colleagues challenged state policymakers to include the private sector in forming appropriations

Presently, the availability of educational opportunities at the college and university level is a critical state and personal interest given the needs of the state for a well-educated workforce which has never been greater. Too many, the focal point of attending college is receiving a high paying job in the future. Unfortunately, in most states, tuition is on the rise and students who come from low-income families find themselves struggling to fund their education. According to legislatures, “The cost of college in New Jersey, as in the nation, continues to grow faster than the rate of inflation.” (State of New Jersey 1). In the national financial aid policy resources that are typically given to the neediest families are shifting towards

Dougherty notes that the “First wave of performance funding adoption began in Tennessee in 1979, and ended in 2000, when a recession struck and caused a sharp decline in new program adoptions and the discontinuation of many existing programs. It seemed as if performance funding had been but a passing fancy. However, beginning in 2007, another wave of performance funding arose. The first-wave programs typically involved a bonus for higher education institutions above base state funding. The performance funding bonus was relatively small, between 1 and 6 percent of base state funding for public higher education” (Dougherty and Reddy 201). This policy has been labeled “performance funding 1.0”.

Historically, many colleges have received state funding based on how many full-time equivalent students are enrolled at the beginning of the semester (NCSL, 2015). This model provides incentives for colleges to enroll students, and thus provide access to postsecondary education, but this model does not necessarily provide incentives for institutions to help students successfully complete degree programs (NCSL, 2015). In fact, such PBF models are reinforcing disparities within higher education and doing little to move the needle to completion (Douglas-Gabriel, 2016). PBF poses a host of questions: Is it a problem? Is public policy redressing the problem? Who are the major advocacy coalitions influencing policymaking? What are some alternatives

Dougherty, K. J., Natow, R. S., & Project, M. (2015). The Politics of Performance Funding for Higher Education: Origins, Discontinuations, and Transformations. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Upon identifying programs available on various college campuses as they relate to first year students; it has become noticeable that university leaders are concerned with the retention of students within their first and second year of college. Therefore many universities have developed programs that are focused on the success of the freshman student and ensuring that group of students’ matriculations throughout their degree programs. As quoted in “The Dynamics of Organization in Higher Education (Kuh, 1996) “the frequent and increasingly predictable accusation that institutions of higher education operate in “silos” is based on their various schools, colleges, and athletic programs operating in parallel with one another, more focused on promoting than on adhering to or accomplishing broader institutional

With the intent of raising the state’s mediocre ranking among higher education institutions, the Tennessee Legislature passed into law the Complete College Act (CCA) in 2006. Setting a goal of increasing the number of college graduates by 3.5 percent annually, the law has radically reformed the way Tennessee funds its public community colleges and universities. Eliminating the old enrollment formula, which funded the institutions based on student enrollment headcounts, the CCA is a model of incentive funding, based on the retention of students and the production of degrees. Its impact on Tennessee’s higher education institutions became a frightening prospect for some under-performing institutions, especially within the state’s community college system. With a limit to the available monies earmarked for higher education, the community colleges suddenly found themselves in the precarious position of competing with each other for available state funding (Jones, 2011).