As presidential candidates met voters and sampled fried food at the Iowa State Fair, just days after Hillary Clinton appeared in Iowa to promote an ambitious set of college-affordability proposals, it’s worth taking stock of a state that is thrust into the national spotlight every election cycle but doesn’t frequently make higher-education headlines otherwise.
With nearly three-dozen private, four-year institutions and just three public universities, the landscape in Iowa — and the impact of state lawmakers — is, in some ways, unique. Yet some of the issues Iowa’s institutions are confronting — declining state support, for example — are common nationwide. We took a look at three major themes playing out across Iowa’s higher-education system:
A Growing Burden on Families
Like most of the country, state support for Iowa’s public colleges and universities is on the decline, a trend that has left families to pay a greater share of tuition costs.
State appropriations dropped about 22 percent from the 2009 to the 2014 fiscal years, according to data from the State Higher Education Executive Officers. Over that same period, net tuition revenue per full-time-equivalent student at Iowa’s three public institutions grew from $6,540 to $8,118 — a 24-percent increase.
Thomas G. Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and former resident of Oskaloosa, Iowa, says that state support there actually began declining in 2002, when lawmakers came to see higher education as “a piggy bank” to draw from when they needed more wiggle room in their budgets.
“That began what I call the looting process for state funding in higher education in Iowa,” Mr. Mortenson says.
The cuts, which in his view are putting Iowa in a “death spiral,” follow a trend nationwide. Just three states — Alaska, Illinois, and North Dakota — have increased funding on a per-student basis since 2008, according to data from the executive-officers group. But that trend would have to reverse in Iowa, or in any state, should it choose to buy into Mrs. Clinton’s college-affordability proposal. She wants to make $175 billion in grants available to states for student aid, but in exchange for that money, they would have to stop making higher-education cuts and would have to slow tuition increases.
Larry H. Ebbers, a professor of higher education who has taught at Iowa State University for 50 years, says he has seen the states’ institutions “unfortunately moving more toward a private-good model” that places more of a burden on families, on the theory that a higher education is primarily of value to the person, not the society.
“Somehow we need to re-establish the public good,” Mr. Ebbers says. “I get very concerned about those devaluing higher education. It is important.”
More Competition Among Institutions
The Iowa Board of Regents, which oversees the three public institutions, proposed a model last year that would have tied a majority of state funding to the number of in-state students that institutions enrolled. The proposal didn’t pass the state’s legislature, but experts say that, when combined with declining numbers of high-school students, it has changed the state of play in Iowa.
For example, the University of Iowa has historically had a lower percentage of in-state students than either Iowa State University or the University of Northern Iowa has had. At one point, the flagship even had a recruiting center in Chicago. But now all three public institutions are trying to court students from more rural parts of Iowa. In doing so, they’re potentially pulling those students away from nearby private institutions, says Christopher Morphew, executive associate dean for research and innovation in the University of Iowa’s College of Education.
“The University of Iowa typically hasn’t marketed itself in-state as much,” he says. “They see that as a danger in terms of the University of Iowa pulling students away from their bases.”
As colleges try to lure students who are increasingly concerned about the value of their degrees, many are including in their recruitment pitches “a lot more conversation about retention and postcollegiate success than I’ve seen in the past,” says Brittania Morey, director of communications at the Iowa College Access Network.
Meanwhile, Ms. Morey says, more students are starting to weigh community-college options and are asking harder questions about whether colleges can guarantee they’ll find jobs after graduation. To raise enrollment, she says, the University of Northern Iowa is recruiting in rural western Iowa for the first time in a decade.
“They’re going outside their normal niche of students to increase enrollment, and there’s a lot more competition between schools,” she says. “With a decrease in funding and a decrease in students available, it’s shifted the way colleges are talking to families.”
The Threat of a Tuition Increase
This summer, after three years of frozen tuition rates, the Board of Regents proposed an unprecedented 3-percent tuition increase for the spring semester. The increase would be the first midyear tuition bump in the history of the three institutions, Ms. Morey says.
The jump would end up costing each student about $100 in the spring semester and would generate $3.5 million in revenue if applied to all three universities, The Des Moines Register reported. If it became a standard practice, though, the increase could make Iowa ineligible for Mrs. Clinton’s proposed grants.
It’s too early to know for sure, but Mr. Morphew says there’s a “good chance” the tuition-increase proposal will pass. Still, he says, the state government “might welcome some federal involvement that rewarded, if you will, students and the state holding the line on tuition.”
For in-state students, tuition and fees at the University of Iowa this year are $8,104, according to the institution’s website.
The average debt of University of Iowa graduates in 2013 was $28,131, according to the Project on Student Debt, a number that is close to the national average. For graduates of many of the state’s smaller private institutions, that number is higher — more than $36,700 at Grand View University, in Des Moines, for example.
Pieces of Mrs. Clinton’s proposal, like a promise to allow borrowers to refinance loans at lower interest rates, could help ease those debt burdens on future students, Mr. Morphew says. “The possibility of that program helping both students at publics and privates with debt,” he says, would alleviate “some of the strains we are seeing here in Iowa.”
Correction (8/17/2015, 12:16 p.m.): This article originally misstated the tuition and fees for in-state residents at the University of Northern Iowa as $6,648. In fact, that is the cost of tuition alone. With fees included, the cost of the university to in-state residents is $7,817. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.