National Study of State Support for Higher Education

This study is a follow-up to WISCAPE's Examining Differences in State Support for Higher Education.  The principal investigator for this project is David Weerts, WISCAPE staff affiliate and assistant professor of higher education at Florida Atlantic University. While this study is primarily funded by grants from the Spencer Foundation and  Florida Atlantic University, WISCAPE is providing additional support, including the assistance of Project Assistant Justin Ronca.

State support for public colleges and universities in the United States has declined dramatically over a thirty year period, and this downward spiral is of great concern to educational leaders and scholars. The purpose of this project is to conduct a large scale study of changes in state appropriations for public colleges and universities from 1975-2005 in order to: 1) identify variables that best explain fluctuations in state support for public universities; 2) identify states that have historically varied in their support of public higher education and reasons behind these variances; and 3) understand contextual differences between institutions that have received high versus low levels of state appropriations. 

Prior studies of this kind have focused solely on overall state support for higher education while ignoring institutional and system governance factors that may contribute to differences in appropriations. This study seeks to understand how variables at all three levels contribute to increasing or decreasing state appropriations for higher education.

Weerts presented results from this study at the WISCAPE forum Balancing Give and Take: Funding and Accountability in Higher Education on October 11, 2007. Slides and audio from that presentation are available online. A WISCAPE working paper based on this study, Determinants of State Support for Higher Education from 1985-2005: An Organizational Theory Analysis, is also available for download.

An appendix with detailed information about the data used for this study is also available.
 

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