Double-Check Those Shocking Statistics on State Funding for Higher Education
10/26/20
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from TPPF,
10/26/20:
What to Know: Why is college so expensive? The usual excuse is that state funding has been cut over the years. Even the Today show repeats this myth.
The TPPF Take: This claim is based on a lot of rhetorical and statistical gymnastics that render even true statements misleading.
“Inflation-adjusted state funding per student increased by almost $2,000 from 1980 to 2019,” says TPPF’s Andrew Gillen. “Still, these endpoint-to-endpoint comparisons can be misleading, so we prefer looking at the long-run trend, which shows that state funding increases by a more modest $30 per student per year. Put simply, state funding has been increasing over time, not decreasing.”
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