New Data on Decline of State Support, 2001-11

New data from the Delta Cost Project, for the American Institutes of Research, show how much the states withdrew support from public higher education during the decade that ended in 2011. But the end of that period, students were paying half of more of the average full instructional costs of attending public-four-year institutions, an 18 to 22 percentage point increase over the course of a decade. Those increases offset or partially offset declines in state support. Institutional subsidies (state or local appropriations or other revenues) reached a low for the decade, averaging $6,000 to $7,000 per student at public four-year institutions.