Public colleges last year experienced their sharpest annual decline in tuition revenue since 1980, driven partly by plunging enrollments.
Net tuition-and-fee revenue per full-time equivalent student in fiscal 2023 was $7,353, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) said Wednesday in an annual report. Adjusted for inflation, that’s down 3.3% from 2022 and 9.4% from 2018.
However, the schools aren’t hurting for money.
Tuition revenue remained 179.6% higher than the $2,629 per student SHEEO recorded in 1980, the first year of available data.
The group of state officials overseeing public colleges said factors in the 2023 decline include a 12-year enrollment slide that accelerated during the pandemic, sparking increased government funding for financial aid programs.
“After years of steady enrollment increases since the [report’s] data collection began, the number of [full-time] students enrolled in public institutions slowly declined, both nationally and across states, over the last decade,” Kelsey Kunkle, a SHEEO policy analyst, wrote in the report.
“However, with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020, FTE enrollment has declined at unprecedented rates in recent years,” she said.
In 2023, public college tuition revenue declined for the third straight year. Before last year, SHEEO said it fell just five times: 2000 (2.7%), 2001 (0.9%), 2019 (3.2%), 2021 (2.5%) and 2022 (0.9%).
According to CollegeBoard, which does not adjust its numbers for inflation, the average annual tuition for in-state students at a four-year public university rose by 2.5% from $10,990 in the 2022-23 school year to $11,260 in 2023-24.
For out-of-state students, it grew by 3% from $28,300 to $29,150 over the same period.
The SHEEO report counted 10.2 million full-time students at public institutions last year, down 0.5%, or 50,464 people, from 2022.
Enrollment fell for the 12th straight year and was down 12.1% from a peak in 2011, it noted.
According to Ms. Kunkle, declining revenues affected public colleges in 37 states and contributed to government funding increases.
“The continued decline in net tuition revenue puts greater pressure on states to not cut funding to public higher education in the coming years,” she wrote.
Her report found state funding for public universities grew 3.7% beyond inflation last year to $11,040 per student, surpassing pre-recession spending for the second time since 2008. Spending per student ranged from $3,990 in New Hampshire to $22,590 in Illinois.
Nationwide, state education allocations per student, with federal COVID-19 relief funds included, were 6.7% higher last year than in 2008. In 2022, they were 3.1% higher.
These two years of spending increases contradicted SHEEO’s 2020 report, which predicted pandemic lockdowns would force states to cut higher education to an extent not seen since 2008.
Far from making cuts, state and local governments poured $129.8 billion into higher education last year.
State tax appropriations accounted for $106.1 billion or 81.7% of that total. Nearly $5.4 billion came from non-tax sources such as state lotteries and $3.5 billion from state-funded endowments and similar funds.
Adjusted for inflation, state and local education spending increased 1.6% at two-year community colleges to $10,488 per student from 2022 to 2023. At four-year colleges, it increased 4.2% to $10,238 per student.
Nevertheless, public universities received less federal COVID-19 stimulus money last year, sparking clashes in various state legislatures about their obligation to bail out schools.
Public colleges received $1.7 billion in federal stimulus funding in 2023, down 26.6% or $609.3 million from 2022.
The report found that spending per student declined in 20 states over the same period. These decreases ranged from 18.3%, or $1,530 less per student, in Delaware to 0.3%, or $31 less per student, in Texas.
Meanwhile, education funding per student increased in 30 states. The increases ranged from 0.4%, or $48 more per student, in North Carolina to 53.6%, or $5,077 more per student, in Alabama.
According to SHEEO, federal stimulus funding played a role in these changes, as some states got more funding last year and others less.
“Federal stimulus funding has continued to have an impact on state funding to higher education,” said Ms. Kunkle, the report’s author.