Gov. Ned Lamont’s budget address on February 5 had much in it to be admired. He talked about investments in affordable housing geared toward walking cities. He flew against national mood by affirming the value of immigrants. And he showed a willingness to “rethink” the volatility cap, the biggest fiscal guardrail, the one that sets aside capital gains and other taxes on investment from the one percent.
But one very important thing that the governor did not mention was a sizable cut to public higher education. If the governor’s budget passes the state legislature as written, my institution of the University of Connecticut would be left with a significant deficit of $84.1 million for the upcoming fiscal year and UConn Health would be left with a $79.7 million deficit.
This is a giant problem for our state for a number of reasons.
First, in the weeks since the governor’s speech, it has become clear that our new federal government has put a target on colleges and universities. Federal grants form a sizable portion of university budgets. With their attacks on grants from the National Institute of Health, it is clear that President Donald Trump and Elon Musk regard even cancer and Alzheimer’s research as “woke.” All categories of federal grants are at risk and I doubt they will stop there: even the future of federally-subsidized student loans are uncertain because of an administration that sees colleges as unnecessary.
Even if some of those federal funds dry up, it would be a devastating loss for our colleges and universities. Scientific research would shrivel on the vine, and the loss of revenues would be passed on to the students. Now more than ever, we need the state to step up and shore up our public higher education system.
But here’s a dirty little secret: because of inadequate state investment, colleges and universities have already been forced to pass the cost along to students.
Students and parents have been feeling the sting of higher college costs for quite some time. The pain is quite real. Nationally, the cost of tuition and fees has been rising faster than the general rate of inflation (CPI) for at least half a century. The trend has abated in the past few years, but a dramatic spike in the sticker price of a college education from the late 1970s to the mid-2010s has made the expensive degree a new normal. From 1978 to 2012, the consumer price index climbed 275%, yet college tuition increased 1,120% over this same period.
Faculty salaries are not leading this rise. More and more, public colleges and universities have resorted to hiring much cheaper “contingent” faculty to staff their classes: that is, adjuncts and lecturers not on the tenure track. In fall 2021, two-thirds (68%) of all college and university faculty members in the US held contingent appointments, compared to about 47% in fall 1987. And about half of these instructors in 2021 were part-time, frequently lacking health or pension benefits. This trend toward hiring more contingent faculty is only accelerating.
Even within existing faculty ranks, faculty salaries have not kept up with inflation. Here, where I teach at the University of Connecticut, many full-time faculty have seen real decreases to their take home pay since September 2020, according to research by UConn political scientist Lyle Scruggs. Nationally, as of June 2024, the average salary of full-time faculty members in inflation-adjusted terms was 3.8 percent less than the average salary in fall 2008.
If faculty salaries are not the cause of rising college costs, what is? There are many contributors, but by far the biggest factor should be obvious: declining state support. Historically, public schools were so much cheaper than private schools because they were public. That is, state governments supported them with enough funds to make the cost of college minimal for several generations of students after World War II. As neoliberalism’s privatization craze took off, states whittled down their long-standing commitments to affordable education.
Connecticut is no exception. Lamont has said multiple times that state funding for higher education is higher than it’s ever been, but that’s true only if you don’t account for inflation.
According to Scruggs’s data, the size of UConn’s block grant fell by 32% in inflation-adjusted terms from 2010 to February 2025; if you reckon it per undergraduate student, it fell 46% over this same time frame. As reported by the CT Insider, the part of UConn’s budget covered by state aid dropped from 50 percent in 1991 to 26% in 2023. Back in its postwar funding peak in 1955-56, UConn got 72% of its income from the state. That same year, the total annual price of attending UConn (including room and board) would have been $8,876 in today’s dollars. It’s close to $40,000 for an in-state student today.
And as my colleague Jeffrey Ogbar pointed out last year, peer institutions like the University of North Carolina and the University of Kansas that get a comparable portion of their budget from the state have endowments that are many times higher than UConn. Last year, theirs were $5 billion and $2.3 billion respectively, while UConn’s endowment was a mere $600 million. Until UConn builds up a solid endowment (which it is currently trying to do), there will continue to be intense pressure on administrations to raise tuition and fees when the state doesn’t come through on its investments.
Inadequate investments in public higher education mean higher tuition and fees for students. It’s that simple. Even if tuition and fees stay flat this upcoming fiscal year, they won’t be able to stay there for long unless the state steps up.
The federal government is run by people who think learning just leads to “wokeness”: ending teaching and scientific research appears to be their answer. The new regime in Washington will make the problem much worse if the state government does not use some of its abundant surpluses to fill the gap. Let’s not forget that the state is projected to have a $1.6 billion surplus next year. We’re not broke: far from it.
Gov. Lamont: step up and shore up. Connecticut’s colleges and universities need your support now more than ever.
Chris Vials is President of the UConn Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.