Two Southeastern states — each with about a quarter of its children living in poverty and with more than a third of its population underrepresented minorities — take contrasting approaches to making a four-year public higher education affordable to their residents.
Florida keeps tuition relatively low and spends around one and a half times as much on merit aid as it does on need-based aid. Tuition and fees at public four-year institutions in South Carolina are more than two and a half times as high as in the Sunshine State, and it spends only a fifth as much on need-based aid as on merit aid. (See comparative data for the states.)
Sort the columns in this interactive table to discover how your state compares with others in terms of demographic challenges, the educational level of residents, faculty pay, college enrollment, tuition costs, and much more. For a snapshot of the national state of higher education, see a separate table for the United States.
The Palmetto State, in fact, is among the most generous when it comes to merit aid, providing more than seven times the national average per student at its four-year and two-year public institutions. Although it has only about a quarter of the population of Florida, the total amount that South Carolina gives out in non-need-based grants exceeds Florida’s.
The shortage of need-based aid is endemic to Southern colleges and puts them on a “collision course with their own demographics,” says Patrick Callan, president of the Higher Education Policy Institute. “If you want to have the kind of work force that is going to be competitive in the 21st century,” he says, “we can’t mathematically do it if we don’t serve groups that we haven’t served so well before — low-income and some ethnic minorities.”
While neither state has solved the problem of access, Florida ranks fourth-best in terms of the percentage of family income required to pay to attend a four-year public nondoctoral institution, and 11th-best in the percentage needed to pay to attend a research institution, according to the 2016 “College Affordability Diagnosis.” On those same two measures, South Carolina ranks 43rd and 46th, says the report, which was published by the Institute for Research on Higher Education, at the University of Pennsylvania. Higher education in South Carolina is “extremely costly … for the state’s poorest,” the report says.
The high cost in South Carolina and elsewhere may discourage students from ever entering college. It also makes those who do start less likely to persist, says Joni E. Finney, director of the Penn institute. “It puts you at greater risk of dropping out, because you may have to take some time out to work or you’re going to work too many hours. Or you may fail because you’re not putting in enough time on your academic studies because you’re trying to work hard enough to minimize your borrowing.”
With its generous merit aid, South Carolina places a high premium on recruiting the best students to its colleges and universities. That aid is available to qualified students no matter what their income.
A key part of ensuring that low-income students earn degrees at the University of South Carolina is to make sure they meet the academic benchmarks required to continue receiving merit aid. The university’s Student Success Center reaches out to students, with faculty members’ help, to make sure their GPAs stay high enough.
Its Gamecock Guarantee program for those with high financial need, which serves 600 to 700 students, boasts the same retention and attainment rates as those of the rest of the student body, says Scott Verzyl, associate vice president for enrollment management.
“We’ve shown you can close that achievement gap with the appropriate amount of resources and support,” he says. To pay for those resources and make up for low state appropriations, the university has enrolled more out-of-state students, who pay higher tuition. While the university has gotten some flak for this, “if we take more out-of-state students, that means we can also accommodate more in-state students,” Mr. Verzyl says. Nevertheless, it will raise tuition for state residents by 3.46 percent in the 2017-18 academic year.
State Sen. C. Bradley Hutto, a Democrat, says the state’s emphasis on increasing scholarship funding rather than direct appropriations for higher education has given institutions an incentive to continue raising tuition to plug holes in their budgets and maximize the scholarship dollars they receive from students.
“It went through a cycle, and, the next thing you know, South Carolina has got the top tuition rates in the Southeast,” says Senator Hutto, who serves on the Education Committee. “What has happened now is, given the average household income and the earning ability of a lot of folks in South Carolina, we’ve sort of priced college out of their range.”
Like most states, Florida endured cuts in state higher-education spending around the time of the recession that began in 2007. But things are looking up. State lawmakers this year voted to increase funds for both merit and need-based aid and for university operations.
John E. Thrasher, president of Florida State University and a former state legislator, says he is pleased with lawmakers’ attention to the state-university system. Over the past five years, Florida State has avoided raising tuition and kept alive several efforts to help low-income students by using other state funds, like awards distributed for “pre-eminent” institutions. That money helped pay for services like the university’s Center for Academic Retention and Enhancement, which offers programs for financially disadvantaged first-generation students.
Florida isn’t a poster child for higher-education access — it ranked 30th in the “Affordability Diagnosis” report, compared with 44th for South Carolina — but the state has managed to rein in costs at its four-year institutions in recent years. Tuition there has remained almost flat since 2012, after several years of sharp increases.
“It became a political liability,” says Terry Golden, policy director at the Florida Policy Institute and a former chief policy analyst for education in the governor’s office. Years of rising tuition had destabilized the state’s prepaid-college-savings program and outpaced the amounts granted by the state’s Bright Futures Scholarship Program, which prompted state policy makers to take a more active role in managing tuition, she says.
Unlike in South Carolina, where independent governing boards control tuition at individual universities, the Legislature sets tuition in Florida. Such central oversight may put a damper on precipitous tuition increases. “The more institutions control it, the more it tends to become the avenue of first resort when budgets are cut,” says Mr. Callan, who was a lead researcher in the “Affordability Diagnosis” study. “The states somewhat put a brake on that.”
“Like most things in America,” he says, “it works better when there are checks and balances.”
Peter Olsen-Phillips is a data reporter at The Chronicle. Follow him on Twitter @POlsenPhillips, or email him at peter.olsen-phillips@chronicle.com.
