WASHINGTON — These days students pay more of the cost of attending public universities than state governments, a shift that is making college less affordable, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.
Researchers found that the money public colleges collect in tuition surpassed the money they receive from state funding in 2012. Tuition accounted for 25 percent of school revenue, up from 17 percent in 2003. State funding, meanwhile, plummeted from 32 percent to 23 percent during the same period.
That’s a far cry from the 1970s, when state governments supplied public colleges with nearly 75 percent of their funding, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland.
Students are paying a bigger chunk of the bill just as more of them are going to public colleges.
The number of students enrolled in public colleges rose by 20 percent from the 2002-03 school year to 2011-12, according to the report. Meanwhile, median state funding per student fell 24 percent, from $6,211 in fiscal year 2003 to $4,695 in fiscal year 2012.
Although states began reducing their contributions to higher-education costs a decade ago, the GAO said the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 caused a precipitous decline.
State budgets were rocked by the recession, and legislatures responded by slashing higher education funding by 23 percent per student, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.
Left in the lurch, universities raised tuition to make up for the funding shortfall.
