Fiscal Equity and America’s Community Colleges

ABSTRACT

Community colleges play an increasingly important role in the higher education landscape. Yet, what is unclear is whether existing models for funding community colleges are up to the task of preserving, or even expanding, access to postsecondary education, particularly among groups historically underrepresented in higher education. Of particular concern has been whether existing resources are distributed among colleges in a fair and efficient manner. In this article, we use frameworks and policy templates from K-12 education finance to better understand differences in resources available to community colleges nationwide, prior to and after the 2008 recession. Specifically, we evaluate the extent of variation in per pupil spending within states; the extent to which variation is associated with community wealth, a proxy for student need; and whether state appropriations, as a share of total revenue, substantively impact fiscal equity. Taken together, we find substantial differences in spending among community colleges within states; evidence that spending differences may be related to proxies for student need; and that changes in state appropriations impact fiscal equity across community colleges.

KEYWORDS:

• Community colleges
• higher education finance
• fiscal equity
• instructional spending

Notes

¹ In 2015, local appropriations to support community colleges were provided in 29 states (SHEEO, 2016).

² Appendix A summarizes the number of community colleges with sufficient data for our models. Several states provided complete expenditure data for a small number of public 2-year colleges. These states were excluded in subsequent tables and analyses.

³ We used the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 Zip Code Tabulation Relationship Files (see https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/zcta_rel_download.html).

⁴ We used the U.S. Census Bureau’s state and county data files, available for each successive year included in our sample (see https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2016/demo/saipe/2016-state-and-county.html).

⁵ It is perhaps more accurate to assert that the county-level income measure is, at the very least, more exogenous than measures of the attributes of the families/students who choose to attend community colleges. One would hope, as one reviewer pointed out, there is some cyclical relationship between community college investment and local/regional economic growth. The fact that the county-level MHI measure is more exogenous makes it the most useful measure for our models.

⁶ The College Scorecard is available as a file containing multiple years of data for each higher education institution. We linked this file using IPEDS institutional identification numbers (see https://collegescorecard.ed.gov/data).

⁷ We linked the ECWI by county of location for each community college included in our panel by year.