New SHEEO reports examine state policies on tuition, fees, and financial assistance for undocumented students and on COVID-19 effects

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To accompany the main report on SHEEO’s 2022 Tuition, Fees and Financial Assistance survey released last week, SHEEO produced two additional reports from the survey responses. One report details COVID-19 pandemic effects on state tuition, fees, and financial assistance policies, and the other examines policies for undocumented students.

Survey responses show that the pandemic impacted several areas of state policy—most significantly through increased funding to state budgets. States received federal funding that they allocated directly to higher education. Some states used these federal funds to protect existing state financial aid programs and initiatives, while others used funding to pilot new programs. Nearly all states were able to keep their state financial aid programs intact during the pandemic, with 14 states reporting new or expanded state programs as part of their pandemic response. 

“Only two states (Nevada and Oregon) reported a reduction in their state financial aid budgets due to COVID-19,” said Jessica Colorado, SHEEO policy analyst. 

When asked if COVID-19 led to any short-term programs or policies that impacted tuition and fees at institutions, particularly for undergraduate students, 10 states reported changes in both sectors, one state reported changes in the two-year sector, and four states in the four-year sector. A greater number of states (58%) froze or limited tuition during the second year of the pandemic compared to the first (48%).

The survey also included several questions about how state policies treat and affect undocumented students at public institutions in each state. At the federal level, most students born outside of the U.S. are ineligible for federal financial aid. These same students are often also ineligible for state financial aid programs, many of which model their eligibility requirements on those established at the federal level. In addition to their ineligibility for federal and most state financial aid, undocumented students confront a variety of policies regulating eligibility for in-state tuition at state postsecondary institutions. 

“State policies regulating undocumented students’ eligibility for in-state tuition at public two- and four-year institutions and their access to state grant aid vary widely across the U.S.,” said Rachel Burns, SHEEO senior policy analyst. 

State tuition policies for undocumented students are also not consistent across sectors. While states are equally likely to offer in-state tuition to undocumented students in the two- and four-year sectors (26% and 25%, respectively), they are more likely to require undocumented students in the four-year sector to pay out-of-state tuition or to mandate that students meet certain requirements (e.g., as undocumented, non-resident, or international students) for in-state tuition. In contrast, the two-year sector is more likely to have no statewide policy.

In addition to tuition policies, states also develop policies regulating undocumented students’ eligibility for state grant aid. Forty-nine percent of states report that undocumented students are ineligible for state financial aid due to state policies, while 12% block student eligibility based on federal policies. Because state policies vary in how undocumented students are classified (e.g., as undocumented, non-resident, or international students), some undocumented students may be eligible for tuition waivers granted to non-resident or international students.

All three State Tuition, Fees, and Financial Assistance Policies 2022 reports, as well as the survey instrument, the longitudinal dataset, and technical report, can be found online at https://sheeo.org/project/tuition-and-fee-survey/.

Sakshee Chawla joins SHEEO as senior policy analyst

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The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) welcomed Sakshee Chawla this week as a new senior policy analyst. Sakshee is working out of SHEEO’s Washington, D.C., office.

In her role, Sakshee will partner with state higher education leaders to replicate and scale the City University of New York’s (CUNY) nationally recognized Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) and Accelerate, Complete, and Engage (ACE) support program to increase college completion rates. She will also work to promote improved student wellness through the development and implementation of state- and system-wide policies that advance student mental health care. Her research interests include student success, educational equity, and upward mobility. 

Before joining SHEEO, Sakshee served as a research analyst and project manager on the Workforce of the Future (WoF) initiative at Brookings. She studied the demographic changes in the composition of labor unions and sought to understand whether unionization status is associated with worker happiness, job satisfaction, and productivity. As a part of her capstone project and thesis in graduate school, Sakshee partnered with the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education to assess the effect of the state’s test-optional admissions policies in reducing barriers and improving access to higher education, particularly for disadvantaged students. Sakshee’s work examining the vital role of community colleges in fostering economic growth was recently published in the book America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Drive Shared Prosperity. Before graduate school, Sakshee worked at EAB where she studied topics including developmental education, faculty and staff mental health, social and emotional learning, as well as student learning loss. 

Sakshee holds a master’s in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and a bachelor’s degree in economics and psychology from Smith College. 

Learn more about our team at https://sheeo.org/about/sheeo-staff/.

About SHEEO

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) serves the executives of statewide governing, policy, and coordinating boards of postsecondary education and their staffs. Founded in 1954, SHEEO promotes an environment that values higher education and its role in ensuring the equitable education of all Americans, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic factors. Together with its members, SHEEO aims to achieve this vision by equipping state higher education executive officers and their staffs with the tools to effectively advance the value of higher education, promoting public policies and academic practices that enable all Americans to achieve success in the 21st century, and serving as an advocate for state higher education leadership. For more information, visit sheeo.org. 

SHEEO report examines tuition, fees, and financial assistance policies among states

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Only six states report a unified strategy for addressing affordability

Many states believe tuition should be as low as possible but leave institutions in control of creating their own tuition-setting philosophy. Most states also do not have a statewide unified strategy for addressing affordability and don’t have a formalized relationship between financial aid and tuition-setting policies. State higher education offices shared these and many other insights into tuition, fees, and financial assistance policies in a survey distributed last year. 

SHEEO’s new Tuition, Fees and Financial Assistance Report provides details on policies and practices that differ between two-year and four-year public institutions. It also includes specific information about the tuition-setting process for graduate students, details on state policies for setting nonresident student tuition, and more information on state policies regarding student fees. While the report does not provide actual tuition costs, it focuses on the policies that establish and regulate tuition, fees, and financial aid amounts. This year’s report provides more enhanced data to include years in which each state had tuition freezes and/or limitations, the institution types subjected to those limits, and the amount of those limits. A new longitudinal dataset, with survey responses back to 1979, has also been published to give a more historical view of these policies.

Across sectors, nearly half of survey respondents indicated that their tuition-setting philosophy was not formalized in statute or policy. The remaining states either formalize their tuition-setting process in legislative statute or through board rule or policy. 

While tuition philosophy often guides a state’s process and intention in setting tuition rates, other factors, such as state budget levels, cost of instruction, and inflation, may take a controlling lead in influencing the tuition-setting process. In both sectors, the factors with the most influence were: ensuring affordability for students, the level of state general fund appropriations, and the cost of instruction. In most states, boards of individual institutions or the system-level coordinating/governing agency is primarily responsible for setting undergraduate tuition rates. 

However, states have recently increased their efforts to control public institutions’ tuition rate increases. In the last five years, 40% of states placed restrictions on tuition rate increases in the two-year sector, and 60% of states placed a limit or a freeze on four-year tuition rate increases. This is up from 54% of states between 2014-2017 and 43% of states between 2010-2014. Most tuition limits capped tuition rate increases between 2-4%.

“When states were asked to clarify the relationship between tuition and financial aid policies in their state, the most common response was that there was no relationship between the two,” said Jessica Colorado, SHEEO policy analyst. Thirty-four percent of the two-year sector and 31% of the four-year sector said there is no intentional relationship between tuition and financial aid policies in their state. For states with an intentional relationship between tuition and financial aid, the most common relationship was to have low tuition and high aid (19% of two-year, and 14% of four-year). Of the states who selected a relationship, 63% of two-year and 72% of four-year respondents reported that the relationship between tuition and financial aid was more of an informal policy or goal.

States have considered, proposed, or adopted several strategies to improve student affordability in the last five years. When compared to the last iteration of this survey, more states have recently implemented or adopted free college or promise programs for the two-year sector (20) than what was reported in the 2017 survey (3). Following free college programs, the next most common programs states adopted were statewide financial literacy programs (15), which include FAFSA completion programs, and open educational resource programs (15). Two states adopted debt-free college, a twist on the traditional free college program.

While affordability has become an increasingly influential factor in tuition-setting policies for state policymakers, codified strategies on affordability that consider tuition rates and availability of financial aid together are absent in most states. Only 10% (six states) of respondents reported a statewide, unified strategy for addressing affordability, down from 32% in the 2017 survey.

A key recommendation from the report is for states to take a multiyear, transparent approach to tuition policy. States should allow for longer-term, multiyear strategies around tuition rate setting. In many states, limitations on how much tuition can increase vary from year to year. One year, the legislature may limit tuition increases to an inflationary adjustment, followed the next year by a freeze on the allowable rate increase.

“In this environment, there is little incentive for institutions and systems to raise tuition to an amount below the allowed limit in a single year since they can’t anticipate what the future will allow,” said Rob Anderson, SHEEO president. 

A more rational approach would provide allowable increases for three to five years and be based on state revenue projections and policy direction from the state with respect to expected higher education funding for institutions and state financial aid. This would allow for better planning by institutions and create a more transparent environment for the students and families who ultimately must pay the tuition costs.

The full State Tuition, Fees, and Financial Assistance Policies 2022 report, survey instrument, the longitudinal dataset, and technical report can be found online at https://sheeo.org/project/tuition-and-fee-survey/. Additional reports, which focus on changes states made to tuition policy following the COVID-19 pandemic and tuition policy for undocumented students, will be released in the coming weeks.

SHEEO welcomes Kristine and Pearson as state policy interns

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The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) welcomes Kristine Jan Cruz Espinoza and Pearson Brown as state policy interns. 

During her internship at SHEEO, Kristine will work on the state higher education finance (SHEF) project, assist with data collection on federal grant funds to Minority-Serving Institutions (MSIs), and help construct an MSI funding project dataset.

Kristine is a Ph.D. student studying higher education and completing a graduate certificate in program evaluation and assessment at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV). Her research interests include race-based higher education policies, currently focusing on Minority-Serving Institutions and racial data classification. Kristine most recently worked as a graduate assistant for a National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduate STEM Education HSI grant-funded professional development program. She also serves on UNLV’s MSI Student Council, which involves undergraduate and graduate students in decision-making around campuswide MSI efforts. Prior to doctoral study, Kristine worked full time as a student affairs officer in the UCLA Asian American Studies Department. Kristine attended Long Beach City College, transferring to the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, where she earned bachelor’s degrees in biology and anthropology, and a master’s of education in educational administration.

During his time at SHEEO, Pearson will work on the state higher education finance (SHEF) project, modeling a federal free-college program, and assist with the FASFA simplification project. 

Pearson is a Ph.D. student in the Louise McBee Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia with research interests in funding sources for higher education and state appropriation processes. Pearson also serves as a graduate assistant for the University System of Georgia’s Division of Research and Policy Analysis. He has recently worked on projects pertaining to gateway course completion, ways course outcomes differ across modalities, and graduates’ earnings. Pearson earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration in professional selling from Baylor University and his master’s of education in college student affairs administration from the University of Georgia. 

Learn more about our team at https://sheeo.org/about/sheeo-staff/.

About SHEEO

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) serves the executives of statewide governing, policy, and coordinating boards of postsecondary education and their staffs. Founded in 1954, SHEEO promotes an environment that values higher education and its role in ensuring the equitable education of all Americans, regardless of race/ethnicity, gender, or socioeconomic factors. Together with its members, SHEEO aims to achieve this vision by equipping state higher education executive officers and their staffs with the tools to effectively advance the value of higher education, promoting public policies and academic practices that enable all Americans to achieve success in the 21st century, and serving as an advocate for state higher education leadership. For more information, visit sheeo.org.