Most states have not recovered from prior recessionary cuts in state funding and now face declines in their other revenue sources. Public institutions may be in a more precarious financial situation than at any other time in recent history. Amid this uncertainty, the SHEF report offers a comprehensive look at where states stood as they weathered the COVID-19 pandemic and economic recession.

BOULDER, Colorado —

In fiscal year 2020, a 2.9% increase in per-student education appropriations marked the likely end of an eight-year recovery in higher education funding. The State Higher Education Executive Officer Association’s (SHEEO) early estimates show that in 2021, inflation-adjusted state appropriations for higher education declined in most states. If past recessions are any indication, higher education likely faces several years of increasingly steep cuts to state funding. This means that public systems of higher education would enter a period of cuts from an already historically low base when compared to previous pre-recession figures.

In addition, institutions face unique financial pressures moving forward. With declining revenue from both states and students and after a year of increased costs due to the pandemic and the switch to online learning, state support for higher education is crucial for the continued success of our public institutions. The 2020 SHEF report provides a clear baseline for understanding state and local funding for public institutions prior to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent 2020 economic recession.

We find that states varied widely in their recovery from the last two recessions. Nationally, education appropriations remained 6.0% and 14.6% below 2008 and 2001 levels, respectively. Appropriations have fully recovered to at least 2008 levels in 18 states, a large improvement from the previous year. Still, funding has not recovered from the last recession in almost two-thirds of the states, and 12 states were at least 20% below 2008 levels.

For the first time, the 2020 SHEF report includes detailed information on state appropriations to institutions, student financial aid, tuition revenue, and student enrollment at two-year and four-year public colleges. These new data bring to light clear disparities in funding and total revenues across sectors. 

Key findings from the 2020 SHEF report include:

• Enrollment declined for the ninth straight year. Following a 0.6% decline over 2019, there were 10.9 million full-time equivalent (FTE) enrolled students in 2020. The enrollment decline was concentrated at two-year public institutions, which reported a 1.9% decline, while four-year public institutions reported a 0.2% increase.
• Two-year public institutions received less funding from state governments. Two-year colleges received $4,969 per FTE in state general operating appropriations, compared to $7,352 at four-year institutions. Local appropriations largely made up for this gap, and total education appropriations at two- and four-year institutions were $8,214 and $8,389, respectively.
• Financial aid continued to rise at a faster rate than institutional funding. Financial aid has increased steadily despite economic recessions that negatively impacted the rest of education appropriations. State public financial aid per FTE increased 7.0% in 2020 and reached an all-time high of $830 per FTE. These funds made up 9.6% of all education appropriations, the largest proportion ever.
• Net tuition revenue decreased for the second straight year. Public institutions averaged $6,726 in net tuition revenue from in-state and out-of-state students in 2020, down 1.0% from the previous year. The decline in net tuition revenue was partly due to increases in state financial aid, but even when including aid, tuition revenue per FTE did not keep up with inflation in either of the last two years. 
• Total revenue continued to rise, but not for all states and institutions. Total education revenue increased 1.2% in 2020, reaching an all-time high of $15,276 per FTE. However, total revenue was not at a record high in more than half of the states, and varied substantially by institution type. Many institutions have not been able to increase tuition revenue to offset declines in state funding, and four-year institutions had 1.64 times the total revenue of two-year institutions.
• Students financed the majority of public institution revenues at four-year institutions. There has been a substantial shift of responsibility for financing public higher education toward net tuition revenue, particularly in the four-year sector. At two-year institutions, the average student share in 2020 was less than a quarter (24.2%). At four-year institutions, the average student
  share was over half (53.2%).

Taken together, these findings paint a concerning picture for higher education finance as the impacts of the 2020 recession continue to affect higher education. While recent state investments in higher education are to be celebrated, per-student funding has never been so low at the start of an economic recession, which typically impacts higher education budgets for years. 

SHEEO President Robert E. Anderson drafted an editorial statement with additional comments regarding the future of state funding for higher education and shared, “Public systems of higher education face unprecedented revenue challenges given the decline in student enrollment. In the past, enrollments in higher education have been countercyclical, rising during economic downturns. The COVID-19 recession proved to be an exception to that rule. This will lead to strain in institutional budgets, particularly at public two-year institutions and at institutions most reliant on tuition revenue. Continued state investment and federal assistance is key to ensuring that institutions are able to serve our students.”

“As the country emerges from a volatile time and states reassess their budgets and priorities,
SHEF provides an important measure of progress made and critical work to be accomplished. SHEF and its new sector-level data give higher education leaders additional tools to fully analyze trends and better advocate for investment in talent development for our students,” said SHEEO Executive Committee Chair Kim Hunter Reed. “Education is an investment that pays. It transforms lives, strengthens communities and drives economic recovery.” 

While these findings are crucial to understanding the broad strokes of national finance trends in higher education, it’s important to note that national trends mask considerable variation across the states. “States vary widely in their contributions to public higher education, and we want to acknowledge the progress made in many states to restore prior funding cuts. Eighteen states have restored funding to at least 2008 levels. This is twice the number of states that were able to do so last year. At the same time, many other states have had no recovery in state funding for higher education whatsoever, and the national narrative of continued increases does not represent their reality,” said Sophia Laderman, senior policy analyst at SHEEO and primary author of the report. “Even more, there are inequalities in funding across institution types. Our new sector-level data bring some of these to light, but even within a sector, it’s important to focus on the disparate impact of state funding cuts to institutions that are heavily reliant on state funding.”

The full SHEF report paints a more complete picture of differences in public higher education finance across states. 

Explore the SHEF website to read the full report and customize the interactive data visualizations. The SHEF website also includes individual state profiles, additional reports on state effort and capacity to fund higher education and early estimates of 2021 state support, and issue briefs that focus on the use of federal stimulus funding for higher education and changes in state funding for private institutions over time. 

###

About the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO)

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) serves the chief 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.

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) welcomes Kelsey Kunkle and Mónica Maldonado as state policy interns.

At SHEEO, Kelsey will be focused on the state higher education finance (SHEF) project and will contribute to the development of issue briefs related to public higher education finance. Prior to joining SHEEO, Kelsey served in multiple student and academic affairs roles at the University of North Texas. In these positions, she primarily supported the academic transitions of community college transfer and returning adult students. Kelsey holds a B.A. in communication from the University of Maryland and an M.Ed. in college student personnel from Western Carolina University. She is currently completing her Ph.D. in higher education at the University of North Texas, where she also serves as a graduate research assistant.

At SHEEO, Mónica will primarily assist the work of the college closures project, an initiative in partnership with the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center to study postsecondary outcomes of students who directly experience closure. Additionally, she supports a number of policy and research pursuits, all focused on the use of data to inform decision-making. Before joining the team at SHEEO, Mónica served as a graduate intern with the Education Strategy Group, Institute for Higher Education Policy, and the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics. Mónica also served as a graduate coordinator at the University of Maryland’s leadership and service-learning office. Prior to this, Mónica worked in recruitment for a D.C. public charter school open to 16-24-year-olds, offering free GED preparation and postsecondary credentials in high-demand fields. In addition, she worked as a trainer with the Posse Foundation. Mónica earned her B.S. in psychology from Berry College and M.A. in higher education from the University of Maryland, College Park. Currently, Mónica is working on her doctoral degree in higher education at the Institute of Higher Education at the University of Georgia, where she also serves as a graduate research assistant.

ABOUT THE STATE HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) serves the chief 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 https://sheeo.org.

Over time, states have both decreased overall support for higher education and shifted their funding from institutional operating support to student financial aid. A review of over 100 research studies shows that these trends have important implications for student enrollment, retention, graduation, and post-college outcomes. By not adequately funding public institutions, states sacrifice their attainment agendas and disproportionately harm underrepresented students.

BOULDER, Colorado —

In 2020, states invested almost $100 billion in higher education institutions and student financial aid. These investments are intended to ensure equal and affordable access to quality higher education, meet state attainment goals, promote the state’s economy, and provide residents with a better life. However, until a recent increase in the quality and production of research on the topic, it was not clear how state dollars contributed to outcomes in higher education. For instance, what happens to student outcomes if a state increases (or decreases) funding for public higher education? In an attempt to answer this question, and with generous support from the Joyce Foundation, the research team at the State Higher Education Executive Officer Association (SHEEO) recently completed a systematic review of more than 100 empirical research studies that rigorously measured the impacts of state appropriations to institutions and student financial aid programs on institutional and student outcomes.

The findings from SHEEO’s comprehensive new paper, “Investigating the Impacts of State Higher Education Appropriations and Financial Aid,” are clear: State funding to both institutions and student financial aid has clear and direct impacts on student enrollment patterns, retention and completion rates, and post-college success.

Key findings on the impact of state appropriations to institutions include:

• State appropriations directly impact the total revenue available for education at public institutions. In response to state funding cuts, doctoral institutions raise alternative revenue sources like tuition, while other four-year and two-year institutions are more likely to respond by cutting expenditures on instruction, academic support, and student services.
• Student enrollment is negatively impacted by cuts in state appropriations, as in-state undergraduate enrollment declines and students move from the public to the for-profit sector.
• A decrease in state funding leads to declining graduation rates at four-year colleges. Fewer degrees and certificates are awarded at all undergraduate levels due to declining enrollment and graduation rates. Consequently, there are measurable decreases in statewide bachelor’s degree attainment.

The measurable benefits of financial aid include:

• Student enrollment patterns shift as low-income students become increasingly able to afford more expensive institutions. Students also become less likely to leave the state for college.
• Students receiving aid are more likely to persist and graduate from their institutions and are more likely to graduate on time. These effects are particularly impactful for low-income students.
• Well-marketed financial aid programs with built-in student support services have the biggest positive impact.

David Tandberg, SHEEO senior vice president and a coauthor of the report, shared, “For the first time in one place, we present concrete evidence that state funding for institutions is a crucial investment that is absolutely necessary for improving student outcomes. If states continue deprioritizing institutional funding, we will see measurable negative impacts on student enrollment, student completions, and graduation rates. At the same time, we present continued evidence that student financial aid can influence where students enroll and help them graduate on time. Overall, we found that public investment matters for students.”

These findings have important implications for state attainment rates. “Many states have set ambitious attainment goals, and meeting these goals is necessary for ensuring that states have an educated workforce. Ultimately, states won’t be able to meet their attainment goals and workforce needs without additional investment in public higher education institutions,” said SHEEO President Robert E. Anderson. “Money matters, regardless of the appropriation mechanism, but we can’t sacrifice one area of funding for another.” 

The publication of this research represents a new direction for SHEEO. The organization has recently been expanding its role in empirical research with the aim of connecting research findings to its members and the broader field of higher education policy to drive evidence-based decision-making.

Carlos E. Santiago, commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education and a reviewer of the report, shared, “This report is timely, comprehensive, and provides an essential playbook for state higher education policymakers. The questions that are raised in this report are fundamental to the work we do on a daily basis. The answers that are provided reflect an important consensus among policy researchers, while providing the important caveat that these answers may vary as the subjects of our focus, timeline of action, and intensity of effort change.”

Nicholas Hillman, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a reviewer of the report, said, “Money matters in higher education and this report summarizes the data behind that fact. It draws on the best research evidence and makes a compelling case that equity and fairness must be front and center in state higher education funding conversations. The report offers important background context and practical recommendations to help SHEEO agencies advocate for much-needed change.”

Based on the findings of the analysis and an understanding of state higher education systems, the authors provide key recommendations for policymakers, including:

• Increase funding to higher education whenever possible. Higher education funding is disproportionately cut during economic recessions, making increases crucially important for maintaining a base level of funding. Additional investments are a primary way states can see significant gains in their postsecondary attainment rates.
• Adjust funding allocation strategies to promote equity and completion. Consider a state funding equity audit to understand gaps in funding across institution types, and examine how these funding patterns intersect with underrepresented student enrollment.
• Examine the alternative revenues available to public institutions, and consider those revenues when allocating funding for higher education. Institutions with an access mission are unlikely to raise tuition rates and increase out-of-state enrollment in response to revenue pressures.
• Ensure that student aid programs are effective by increasing messaging for programs and investing in student support services to complement dollars awarded to students.

Additional recommendations for policymakers are included in the full report. The complete report, along with a webinar presentation of the study, and databases of summarized research on state appropriations and financial aid can be found on the SHEEO website. This work would not have been possible without the fantastic and rigorous research produced by the many higher education finance and financial aid researchers.

###

About the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO)

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association serves the chief 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.

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) welcomes Carrie Klein, Ph.D., as a senior policy analyst.

Dr. Klein will be located at SHEEO’s Washington, D.C., office, where she will contribute to SHEEO’s efforts to develop state postsecondary data and information resources, provide technical assistance and professional development to SHEEO agency researchers and policy analysts, and collaborate with partner organizations.

Before joining SHEEO, Dr. Klein was a senior fellow and higher education lead on the Future of Privacy Forum’s Youth and Education team. Before that, Dr. Klein worked as a strategic planning project manager in George Mason University’s (GMU) office of the president and in the office of university life. 

Dr. Klein is also an affiliate faculty member and graduate (Ph.D. and MAIS) of GMU’s Higher Education Program. The overarching aim of her research is to study interactions between higher education organizations and individuals, with the goal of creating more equitable outcomes. Dr. Klein’s recent research has focused on understanding the influences of data systems on organizational and individual decision-making, policy, and equity. Her master’s thesis, a qualitative instrumental study on collaboration across organizational cultural differences on campus, won the 2014 ACPA Gerald Saddlemire Masters Research Award.

ABOUT THE STATE HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) serves the chief 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 https://sheeo.org.

Boulder, CO – SHEEO represents the executive officers of statewide governing and coordinating/policy boards who are responsible for overseeing higher education in their state. SHEEO has 61 members representing all 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Northern Mariana Islands. The annual Membership Report uses data collected from its members in the spring of each year to provide an in-depth look at SHEEOs, SHEEO agency senior leaders, and SHEEO agency staff demographic data, along with data on agency size, operating budgets, and key functions. The SHEEO Membership Report was expanded for FY 2020 to include SHEEO agency leadership makeup, race/ethnicity and sex demographics of agency leadership and SHEEOs, and SHEEO prior employment and education experience. The data for this report serve as a benchmark for where the members were before the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on membership could be measured.

Brandon Bishop, policy analyst at SHEEO and the primary author of the report, said, “These data provide brand-new insights into state higher education agencies’ staffing, functions, and resources. These data will help our members draw comparisons to like agencies and develop new policies, procedures, and practices moving forward.”

Twenty-nine percent of SHEEO FTE staff are people of color, with the percentage of people of color decreasing in SHEEO agency senior leadership positions (16%) and the SHEEO position (18%) as seen in Table 1. Senior leadership and the SHEEO position are disproportionately white, with 74% of SHEEO senior leadership and 78% of SHEEOs being white. American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, multiracial, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander people are underrepresented among SHEEO senior leadership and the SHEEO position. Although Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander people are not technically underrepresented in senior leadership positions, only 1 out of 312 senior leaders is Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.

Table 1:

The Membership Report and the accompanying Agency Profiles provide data that illustrate how these populations are represented within state agencies and how those numbers compare to their state populations.

A majority of SHEEO FTE staff identify as female (54%), but 44% of SHEEO agency senior leadership and 26% of SHEEOs identify as female. Positions with the highest male representation are information officer (67%) and financial officer (67%), while the positions with the most female representation are communications officer (60%) and academic officer (56%).

Coordinating/policy boards tend to be state agencies or departments within state government that are more likely to perform regulatory functions and resource allocation functions, while governing boards tend to be state systems of higher education and have more formal authority over the institutions in the state. Due to the vast differences in FTE and budgets, these data are best viewed disaggregated by coordinating/policy boards and governing boards. Coordinating/policy boards saw a 1.1 FTE increase from 2019 to 58.9 FTE staff and a $4.8 million increase in their median operating budget from 2019 and now have a median $12.3 million operating budget. Governing boards saw a 2.5 FTE decrease from 2019 and now have 62.5 FTE staff and saw a decrease of $2.6 million from 2019, resulting in a $10.1 million median operating budget. The mean coordinating board operating budget ($15,592,331) was significantly smaller than the mean governing board operating budget ($41,801,501).

The top functions performed by SHEEO agencies in FY 2020 are similar to FY 2019, however, there were increases in both managing equity and diversity programs and information technology coordination.

The top functions performed in FY 2020 included maintaining, collecting, and reporting data on higher education, budgeting and fiscal policy analysis for higher education, research and policy evaluation, and coordination with departments of labor, workforce, and/or economic development.

Seventy-nine percent of SHEEOs have postsecondary education experience; 45% of SHEEOs came directly from working in postsecondary education. However, there are differences in immediate prior job experience between coordinating/policy board SHEEOs and governing board SHEEOs. Coordinating/policy board SHEEOs were more likely to come directly from working in education policy/politics, while governing board SHEEOs were more likely to come from postsecondary education. Fifty-six percent of SHEEOs have a Ph.D. or Ed.D., with 12 (20%) SHEEOs having a degree in public policy and 10 (16%) SHEEOs having a degree in education.

SHEEO President Robert Anderson said, “It is our hope that this report and accompanying web tools will provide SHEEO agencies, other state policymakers, and researchers with critical information they can use to evaluate agencies’ capacity to fulfill their critical missions and the alignment of their functional authorities with the priorities they are charged with carrying out.”

This year, SHEEO has created a Membership Report page on our website. The new page hosts a downloadable dataset of the FY 2020 Membership Report data and interactive State Profiles that show the FY 2020 Membership Report data for each of our members.

###

About the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO)

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association serves the chief 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.

“The American Families Plan is a transformative proposal to open the doors of college opportunity at a level unseen since the passage of the Higher Education Act. We are thrilled to see President Biden putting public colleges and universities at the heart of his policy agenda, recognizing their outsized role as economic drivers and portals of upward mobility. The American Families Plan includes historic investments in student access to community colleges and minority-serving institutions, along with renewed commitments to Pell Grants and teacher preparation programs. We are also pleased to see the plan prioritizing funding for student support services, which are instrumental to college completion. If enacted, the American Families Plan would be game changing for those seeking to advance their education and skills, particularly low-income students and students of color.

State higher education leaders look forward to learning more about this plan and stand ready to work with lawmakers to broaden student access to a full array of high-quality, affordable public colleges and universities. Through robust state-federal collaboration, we can create a shared policy framework that increases student access and success, closes equity gaps, and extends prosperity to more Americans.”

###

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) welcomes Lynneah Ciera Brown as a policy analyst.

Lynneah will be located at SHEEO’s Boulder, Colorado office, where she will contribute to its growing research portfolio by using data to create actionable, policy-relevant insights for state systems of higher education and will leverage advanced statistical approaches to create reproducible analyses and accompanying data visualizations, descriptive tables, trend comparisons, and causal estimates. She will be a primary contributor to the college closures project in collaboration with the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, supported by Arnold Ventures. Lynneah will also use her training and skills to identify and promote best policies and practices related to closing equity gaps in higher education.

Lynneah is currently a doctoral candidate and the American Educational Research Association – National Science Foundation Dissertation Grant recipient in the department of education policy studies at Pennsylvania State University (PSU). She received her B.A. degree in English literature from Florida State University and her Ed.M. in higher education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her research interests include state and federal higher education policy, specifically, performance-based funding for higher education and postsecondary access and success for underrepresented students. Before joining SHEEO, she served as a graduate research assistant and academic mentor at PSU, graduate research intern at the Association of American Medical Colleges, and graduate research assistant within the College of Education at UIUC. Lynneah also served as a professional academic advisor and adjunct professor at Florida International University and has internship experience as a summer registration advisor and a teacher success initiative advisor at UIUC.

ABOUT THE STATE HIGHER EDUCATION EXECUTIVE OFFICERS ASSOCIATION

The State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) serves the chief 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 https://sheeo.org.

“We applaud President Biden’s leadership on modernizing the nation’s infrastructure and his commitment to economic and workforce development, closing equity gaps, and addressing climate change. The American Jobs Plan includes key investments to update community college facilities, which serve as vital college access points for millions of Americans. We are also pleased to see the American Jobs Plan prioritizing access to high-speed broadband infrastructure and funding to strengthen our nation’s research capacity, including at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority serving institutions (MSIs).

Public higher education remains central to creating an inclusive, durable economic recovery and is vital to long-term American competitiveness. We look forward to working with the Biden administration and Congress to address long-neglected infrastructure needs found throughout public higher education, particularly at institutions serving large shares of low-income students and students of color. Working in partnership with states, these investments will help put people back to work and serve our students and communities for decades to come.”

###

For more than a decade, the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association (SHEEO) has collected data on state support for higher education in the current fiscal year on behalf of Illinois State University’s Center for the Study of Education Policy. 

The past fiscal year has been one of tremendous uncertainty and financial challenges for colleges and universities. Institution leaders have faced sharp declines in many of their revenue sources in addition to unexpected new costs as they have attempted to respond to the repercussions of the pandemic. Within this context, we received the first look at early fiscal year 2021 state appropriations from the Grapevine survey on state higher education funding. SHEEO has completed a detailed analysis of these data. In this brief, we highlight detailed, timely, and important trends in state tax appropriations and sector-level appropriations.

The murders and shootings that happened on March 16 in Atlanta, of primarily Asian women, are appalling and devastating. Further, the increase in hate crimes directed at Asian people over the past year is horrific and must stop. SHEEO stands against hate and violence against the Asian American community.

In the higher education community, Asian Americans are often, unfortunately, left out of equity conversations due to erroneous notions that they are uniformly successful and high achieving compared to other communities of color. But learning about Asian Americans in higher education and the particular forms of institutionalized racism and discrimination they face helps us understand how these stereotypes not only marginalize Asian communities but also reinforce anti-Blackness and white supremacy. Having this knowledge will allow us all to better acknowledge and, importantly, fight back against the rise of anti-Asian hate in the past year.

We stand with the Asian American community and push back against anti-Asian hate and all forms of racism. As an organization, SHEEO will work to ensure that we do not replicate the model minority myth and ensure all our spaces and research honor, respect, and stand with the Asian American community.