Marketplace Map Gives Half the Story

Last week, American Public Media's Marketplace posted an interactive map—attached to a much-appreciated interview with me—enabling users to see how much states spent per public-college student in 2011, and how that had changed over the the last twenty-five years. It cites as its sources the State Higher Education Executive Officers and me. Unfortunately, it gives only half of the story I was trying to relate with my crunching of SHEEO's data: per-pupil state and local spending has generally been on a downward trend, but that does not come close to fully explaining rising prices.

To get the full breakdown of the data you can access my calculations here. Note, though—as I wrote in the blog post to which my crunching was originally attached—I didn't put the spreadsheet together for widespread dissemination, at least not to appear authoritative. I think it's on target, but I didn't triple-check it as I would have a more formal data analysis. More importantly, the key point is that while most states have seen decreasing per-pupil allocation trends—primarily because of very large enrollment spurts—they have much more than made up for those losses through tuition increases, bringing in roughly two dollars for every dollar lost. Taxpayers aren't cheap— colleges are greedy.