Compare and contrast: Is it unfair to ask university students to pay more?

Ever since I read a passage in University Chancellor Jim Rogers’s speech on the state of the system, I’ve been casting about looking for some way to compare his stats with those of other states.

This is what Rogers said:

“The state pays about 80% of the System’s cost. The student pays 20%.  If the state were to cut its contribution by 36%, the state would then contribute 51% and the students would contribute 49%, an increase of more than two and a half times our current tuition and fees. An increase in tuition and fees to fill the hole the Governor describes would make tuition and fees so high that it would be cheaper to go out of state to college. At a time when more Nevadans are unemployed and underemployed than ever before, how many could afford to attend Nevada’s colleges?”

Eureka, I found it.

It turns out the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability looked at how much the nation’s universities are subsidized by taxes and how much is paid by student tuition.

The stats are a couple of years old now and were trending upward every year, so there is no telling what the stats are now.

Here is what Delta Project found:

“Students are paying more of the total cost of their education at all institutions except private research universities. From 2002 to 2006, the share of educational costs represented by student tuition rose from just over one-third to nearly one-half at public four-year institutions.  At private master’s and bachelor’s institutions, students are paying between 75 and 85 percent of the full cost of their education.”