Kentucky Going Backwards with Higher Education Funding – What Does It Mean?

For the past several years, colleges and universities across the Commonwealth have been receiving less and less dollars from the state to augment their budgets.

Since the recession ended (officially) Kentucky's investment in higher education is in the nations bottom 10, not a good place to be.

Kentucky News Connection, in a submitted article, reach out to Researcher Ashley Spalding, who crunched the numbers for the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy.

She says the state is headed in the wrong direction.

"We're not reinvesting in higher ed," she explains. "The report shows that per-student funding has just increased that tiny amount in the past year."

In Kentucky, only $27.00 per student - after inflation adjustments - was invested. Nationally some states invest up to $450.00 per student!

In Kentucky, our lawmakers passed a budget to reduce state spending on higher education 1.5 percent each of the next two years. That's right - reduce.

Ms. Spalding states, "So this is especially hard on low-income Kentuckians who are more likely to have their decision about whether or not to go to college influenced by finances."

According to her research, the average debt level for a student who obtains a four-year undergraduate degree from a Kentucky public university now tops $22,000.

And, since 2007, tuition has increased more than 23 percent in Kentucky. State support, meanwhile, dropped 25.4 percent.

Spalding warns, "... we'll see impacts in the long term there as well if we don't start to reinvest."

In raw, inflation-adjusted dollars, the state has spent $2,649 dollars less on each college student since 2008.