Plan to overhaul higher education funding meets U of I opposition
[May 02, 2025]
By Peter Hancock
SPRINGFIELD — A plan to overhaul the way Illinois funds public
universities is running into stiff opposition from the state’s largest
higher education institution, the University of Illinois System.
The plan, which has been in development for the last four years, calls
for adding roughly $1.7 billion in new university funding over the next
10-15 years, but distributing that under a formula that would give
priority to schools that are currently the least adequately funded.
Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, D-Westchester, the lead
sponsor of Senate Bill 13, said it is designed to bring equity and
stability to the state’s higher education system.
“This bill does not just aim to increase funding,” she told a Senate
committee Wednesday. “It tells us for the first time in our state’s
history what students and universities need to succeed and how to
adequately fund universities over time to actually meet that need. It
defines what universities require to educate, support and graduate
students successfully, and then it directs resources to do just that.”
But Nick Jones, executive vice president and vice president of academic
affairs for the U of I System, said the proposed formula would be
detrimental to the state’s flagship university and that it needs
considerably more work before it can be ready for legislative approval.
“The University of Illinois system is absolutely dedicated to expanding
equitable access, enhancing student success and promoting statewide
economic growth,” he told the committee. “The proposed legislation
penalizes institutions that provide the most support for
underrepresented and rural students while failing to ensure long-term
access.”
History of underfunding
The proposal is a product of a commission that lawmakers established in
2021 — the Illinois Commission on Equitable Public Education Funding.
The commission grew out of the Legislative Black Caucus’ efforts that
year to enact sweeping social and racial justice reforms in the wake of
unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd at the hands of
Minneapolis police the previous summer.
“Every university participated in the commission, and the work of the
commission acknowledged that Illinois has never had a systemic approach
to university funding, nor one that is rooted in student or
institutional need,” Lightford said. “Instead, it has been a largely
political process.”
Robin Steans, executive director of the advocacy group Advance Illinois,
which took part in the commission, said Illinois went through a
decadeslong period of steadily cutting its support for higher education,
resulting in a system she said is so underfunded it can no longer be
sustained.
As recently as 2000, she said, state funding for universities covered
about 75% of their overall costs. Today, she said, state funding covers
only about 35%, far below the national average of 60%.
“And the only place to go to make that up is tuition,” she said. “And so
the lower we go, the more we’re pushing those costs to students, pricing
them out and driving them out.”
Proposed new formula
The proposed formula would operate much like the Evidence-Based Funding
formula, or EBF, that lawmakers adopted in 2017 for K-12 education.
It would start with determining an “adequacy target” for each school to
reflect how much they need to meet their educational missions. That
would include such things as the cost of instruction and student
services, operation and maintenance of physical facilities, and costs
associated with meeting the school’s research and public service
missions.
Like the EBF formula, that calculation also would take into account the
unique attributes of each school’s student body and the higher costs
associated with educating certain demographic groups, referred to in the
bill as “underrepresented students.”
[to top of second column]
|
Robin Steans, left, executive director of Advance Illinois,
testifies in favor of a bill to overhaul funding of public
universities during a Senate committee hearing Wednesday, April 30,
2025. (Capitol News Illinois photo by Peter Hancock)
The formula then measures each school’s “resource profile” – the money
it has available from sources such as state aid, tuition and fees, to
cover the costs included in its adequacy target.
Those two calculations are used to determine each school’s “adequacy
percentage,” which reflects the degree to which a school is underfunded,
and its “adequacy gap,” the dollar figure reflecting the difference
between its adequacy target and available resources.
According to preliminary calculations made public Wednesday, Western
Illinois University in Macomb would rank as the most underfunded public
university in Illinois on a percentage basis, with current resources
meeting only 45.7% of its adequacy target. But because WIU is relatively
small, its total “adequacy gap” would be just $104.3 million, ranking
seventh among individual campuses.
In terms of total dollars, the University of Illinois Chicago would have
the largest adequacy gap of any campus, at nearly $475.5 million.
Meanwhile, the state’s flagship university, the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign, would rank as the best-funded university in the state,
at 88.6% of adequacy. But because of its size – with total enrollment in
the fall 2024 semester of more than 56,000 – its total adequacy gap
would rank fifth among all campuses, at $137.4 million.
U of I opposition
“Although we support several of the key aspirational goals of the bill,
we do not agree with the methodology proposed to achieve those goals,”
Jones, of the U of I System, told the committee. “Nor do we agree that
this will provide what the University of Illinois needs to succeed.”
Jones noted the U of I System as a whole – including the
Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield campuses – enroll more than
half of all public university students in Illinois, including 45% of all
those who qualify for Pell grants, the federal need-based financial aid
program for higher education. And yet, under the proposed formula, he
said the U of I System would receive only 28% of any new funding
provided in the first year of the program.
In addition, he said the proposal also includes a formula for allocating
any potential funding cuts that could happen in future years, one that
would protect schools that are least adequately funded while requiring
those closest to their adequacy target to bear the brunt of the cuts.
Under that formula, the U of I System would absorb 74% of any future
funding cuts.
“The University of Illinois system would support adopting a tiered,
mission-aligned approach that better recognizes the distinct missions of
the universities and equitably funds institutions based on their
specific needs and contributions to student success and the state’s
economic priorities,” Jones said. “This approach would ensure that
funding supports student outcomes holds institutions accountable for
results and drives true equitable distribution of the state’s investment
in higher education.”
The Senate committee took no action on the bill Wednesday. An identical
bill, House Bill 1581, is pending in the House. It is sponsored by Rep.
Carol Ammons, D-Urbana, and is cosponsored by House Speaker Emanuel
“Chris” Welch, D-Hillside, and Rep. Katie Stuart, D-Edwardsville, who
chairs the House higher education budget committee.
Capitol News Illinois is
a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government
coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily
by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.
|
