SHEEO Report Tracks State Higher Education Finance for FY 2017

Title: SHEF: FY 2017 – State Higher Education Finance Report

Author: Sophia Laderman

Date: April 2018

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association recently updated and released their annual State Higher Education Finance report for fiscal year 2017. This report tracks the current state of funding levels for public higher education institutions in order to better understand how state and federal appropriations and public policy decisions affects levels and distributions of funding both nationally and statewide.

Highlights from the report are as follows:

• Previously, public colleges and universities were funded mostly through state appropriations. This was the first year that in the majority of states, public colleges and universities were more dependent on tuition than appropriations.
• The net revenue from tuition increased only 0.4 percent from the previous year; however, since the Great Recession of 2008, net tuition revenue has increased 34.4 percent.
• Even after five continuous years of per full-time equivalent (FTE) appropriation increases, appropriation levels still lag behind Recession and pre-Recession levels. Educational appropriations from state legislatures increased 2.5 percent this past year; yet appropriations per FTE student is $1,000 lower than appropriation levels in 2008 and almost $2,000 lower than in 2001.

For more information, read the report here.