The Higher Education Blues
March 29, 2012 in Educator and Leader Effectiveness, Next Generation Learning

State, Local, and Net Tuition Revenue Supporting General Operating Expenses of Higher Education U.S., Fiscal Year 2010, Current (unadjusted) Dollars
I’ve got some good news, and some bad news.
The good news? A report from the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) shows that state and local funding for higher education held steady for 2011.
The bad news? The numbers are disappointing. Overall 2011 funding was $87.5 billion, but from 2005 to 2008, according to SHEEO, state and local support for public higher education grew to $88.9 billion. This helped to rebuild the per-student support lost during the 2001 recession. But then, as we all well know, the Great Recession wreaked havoc on all sectors of the economy.
And, at the same time (2008-2011), while student enrollments grew by an additional 12.5%, state and local support dropped. So schools need to adapt to the increased demand, tuitions have gone up, and per-student funding has decreased virtually everywhere.

State, Local, and Net Tuition Revenue Supporting General Operating Expenses of Higher Education U.S., Fiscal Year 2011, Current (unadjusted) Dollars
A lot of numbers, I know, but they all boil down to this: higher education institutions are wrestling with how to do more with less, and through a combination of innovation, entrepreneurship, and determination, they need to find ways to, as the report says, “reduce attrition, the cost of instruction, and time to a degree, while improving instruction and increasing the numbers of students who graduate.”
A tall order, yes, and there are no “right” solutions, but schools can look into such actions as:
- Rethinking course structure so faculty can give students more attention while maintaining educational standards;
- Providing more support services to students to aid in their retention and completion goals, and helping with career planning and job placement;
- Setting up collaborative conferences for faculty from different disciplines to share brain power, case studies, and resources;
- Using technology to give 24/7 course access so the large number of students who need to work and go to school can manage both.
These are of course only a few of the types of services colleges and universities must provide to keep pace with what students need and can afford. But the more they face up to the challenges, the more likely they are to find innovative ways to tackle them—especially when leveraging technology-based tools is part of the solution.





