Big Target, Bigger Cuts - Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed

Per-student state funding for public research universities dropped about 20 percent between 2002 and 2010, according to a report being released today by the National Science Board, the policy-making arm of the National Science Foundation. The report’s authors said they were particularly interested this year in states' funding of science and engineering research at the university level and what impact the national recession has had. In inflation-adjusted dollars, total state support for the top 101 public universities declined by 10 percent between 2002 and 2010, with nearly 75 percent receiving cuts. Because institutions' enrollments grew significantly during this period, the per-student decline was about twice as steep. State funding declined as a share of these universities’ budgets from 28 percent in 2001 to 19 percent in 2009.