Last month the Delta Cost Project released its annual report on college spending, Trends in College Spending 1999-2009: Where Does the Money Come From?  Where Does It Go?  What Does It Buy?  Examining the decade between 1999 and 2009 the report paints a bleak picture of the current state of higher education spending with very small but notable improvements in specific areas. 

In general, the report finds that revenues are down and spending (overall and per student) reflects that decline.  Recession-related state budget cuts meant deep cuts to educational appropriations.  As a result, schools in every sector of the industry raised tuitions (in some cases significantly) in an attempt to make up that difference.  American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) funds may alleviate some pressure in the future but because most institutions did not begin receiving those funds until the last part of 2009, the impact of that funding source is not fully captured in the report. 

Some of the most striking statistics are related to community colleges.  In 2009 alone, community colleges were educating more than 6.5 million students, accounting for approximately one-third of all the nation’s college students.  Though shouldering a large portion of the burden of educating the nation’s college students, community colleges also saw the largest funding declines during the decade.   

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The Delta Cost Project recently released a report titled, “Trends in College Spending: Where Does the Money Come From? Where Does it Go?” The report is enlightening given the well-documented increases in college costs combined with the current financial crisis. 

The Forward to the report, written by Delta Cost Project’s Executive Director, Jane Wellman, notes that “Our country needs to increase capacity and improve performance in higher education.  We can’t allow the funding crisis to justify rollbacks in access or quality.”  The report utilizes the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data provided by all institutions of higher education to the U.S. Department of Education, but the authors admit that “private for-profit institutions, an important and growing sector in American higher education, are excluded from the fiscal analyses because of the poor quality of trend data for these institutions.” 

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