Higher Ed Reference Data

There's a lot of noise coming out of the legislature with respect to higher education funding. The House added money to Strickland's proposal, with the Senate piling on and adding more than the House.

Everyone wants to barter State appropriations for tuition freezes or caps.

In a similar manner to the k-12 funding debates, I think there is a tendency among folks to view funding and budgets as fairly similar, and furthermore, similar to whatever is serving as a prototype for the viewer. This is not really the case. Here are some graphs (click them to enlarge) based on some publicly available** summaries of budget numbers for Fiscal Year '07 (which ends this month). In them, you can find differences in the overall scope of the operating budgets, the proportion of funds coming from tuition and fees, the proportion coming from state appropriations, the proportion coming from grants, contracts, and other local/state/federal sources, and other (which includes things like endowment earnings, alumni gifts, licensing, athletic revenues, dorm room/board, etc.).

These schools are obviously in very different positions when it comes to bartering appropriations vs. tuition and fees, and vary widely perhaps in the degree to which they should be conceptualized as state-supported institutions of higher learning.



** data sources:
http://www.osu.edu/osutoday/stuinfo.php#budget
http://www.uakron.edu/busfin/reports/2Q07/revenue2q07.php
http://www.uc.edu/cfo/documents/CFO/budgetplan/Budget_Book_07.pdf
http://www.case.org/guide/cuyahoga.html
http://www.ysu.edu/vpadmin/budgetdocs/FY07Budgetfinal.pdf
http://www.units.muohio.edu/bpa/FY2007/Exhibits%201%202006-2007%20seq8.pdf
http://www.wright.edu/admin/bpra/fy06-07_cfbw.ppt