Kansas’ six state universities now get less than 30 percent of the funds they need from Topeka, according to a study by the Kansas Board of Regents.
The study, released Tuesday, said that in 2005, state funding covered only 29 percent of the schools’ operating costs. If trends continue, that could fall to less than a quarter of operating costs by 2010.
The numbers came as no surprise to John Schwenn, the interim president of Emporia State University.
“The state is not keeping up the resources to help prepare an educated society, which is the best means of economic development,” Schwenn said. “I don’t believe the state is keeping up their end of the bargain to better prepare our workforce.”
The study looked at funding levels over the last 20 years. Between 1985 and 2005, it reported, funding per full-time student fell by $1,635, or 29 percent. Over the same period, overall state spending grew by 54 percent but total state support for universities only went up by 5 percent.
Increasingly, the money is coming from students and their families instead, the study said. In 1985, 15 percent of the universities’ money came from tuition and fees. That’s gone up to 23 percent.
By 2010, the study reported, tuition and fees could account for 25 percent of university operating funds. That would mean that Kansas families would spend more on the state universities than the Legislature.
“You can’t put everything on the backs of our students,” Schwenn said. “Forty percent of our students (at ESU) are first-generation college students. They don’t have the same resources or the same capabilities you or I had.”