If you are a person who exists in America, you’ve likely heard about how expensive college has gotten. Maybe you’re putting a good chunk of your paycheck toward student loan payments, or you’ve heard friends complain about the cost of sending their kids to college.
What you may not realize is the problem is especially bad in Illinois, where public colleges have become particularly unaffordable. That’s shut out a lot of students, including those who would most benefit from the social mobility that comes with a degree.
Now, a group of Illinois legislators and advocates is proposing groundbreaking legislation to try and address the problem. The bill has largely flown under the radar, perhaps because of its very unsexy name: the Adequate and Equitable Funding Formula for Public Universities Act. Or maybe it’s because the formula it prescribes, by necessity and design, is incredibly complex.
Fortunately for you, we’ve been spending months learning about this effort. Here’s what you should know — and why you should care.
Have a young child? This legislation could mean that in 10 years or more, when they’re getting ready to graduate high school, they may have public college options in Illinois that are actually affordable.
Right now, there’s no system to determine how much money public universities need to educate students. Instead, college leaders go to Springfield to ask for money and cross their fingers that they get it. Over time, they’ve gotten less and less.
From 2000 to 2022, state funding for public universities was cut nearly in half, in inflation-adjusted dollars. It used to make up most of their revenue, but now, the colleges have come to rely mostly on tuition. In turn, the cost of attending a public college in Illinois has skyrocketed, especially in comparison to how much families in the state earn.
Legislators want to shift the financial responsibility for educating and training Illinois residents from students back to the state. The hope is that, in a decade, tuition rates at places like Governors State University in Chicago’s south suburbs and University of Illinois Springfield won’t leave students hobbled with debt — or shut out of college altogether.
Everyone talks about the well-known, fancy schools, but most people go to college close to home. The formula could turn the tide for smaller public universities that serve many of the state’s marginalized students.
Using any formula would be a big change for the state. But legislators and advocates are pushing for something unlike any other in the country.
If the AEFFPUA passes (we doubt this acronym will stick), the state would distribute money based on how much each public university needs to educate and support the specific kinds of students it serves, setting aside more money for students who are first-generation, low-income or racially marginalized.
Dividing up the pie this way could help the state’s public regional universities recruit and get more of these students to graduation. Take Chicago State University: Seven in 10 students at the South Side college are Black. More than half have low family incomes.
Unlike the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, which serves students with more means, Chicago State has not been able to increase its tuition much to make up for huge declines in public funding. That’s impacted the services the school can offer, which leads to lower enrollment, which means even more cuts. It’s a cycle that hurts Black and poor students in the state.
“A parent now with a 7-year-old maybe wouldn’t look at Chicago State, because if they drove past it, they’d see a stop sign that might be crooked and a little bit of flooding due to the bad infrastructure,” said Christian Perry, policy director for the advocacy group Partnership for College Completion.
Perry said the funding formula could provide the resources to restore the campus to what it was like when his grandfather got his bachelor’s degree there in the 1970s.
“It could be buzzing and humming with more students, and you might feel a bit more comfortable trying to strong-arm your baby to stay home and go to Chicago State because of the amenities and what they can offer,” he said.
Alas, nothing in life is free.
Fully funding the formula will require $135 million more in higher education spending each year for the next 10 years. That adds up to an extra $1.4 billion dollars over a decade from taxpayers.
But advocates, researchers and policymakers say the payoff will be many times that.
Mike Abramson, a researcher for the Partnership for College Completion, estimates that fully funding the proposed higher education formula would lead to nearly 30,000 more college graduates in the state, who would contribute $6 billion in taxes over their lifetimes.
“It’s obviously a big, scary number for a lot of people,” Abrahamson said of the funding proposal. “But it would bring us back to around what we invested in the early 2000s, when our university system was thriving.”
