An unsettling but not surprising trend has been confirmed by a recent study that examined the amount of support states give to higher education.

In an era hit by the Great Recession and the ensuing slow economic recovery, declining or flat tax revenues and tight budgets, it’s no shock to learn that the level of states’ financial contributions to their colleges and universities has shrunk overall.

But the annual Grapevine Study by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University has provided some specifics to indicate by how much.

The study found that states’ allocations to higher education fell by an aggregate of about $6 billion over the last year. That amounts to a decline of 7.6 percent. The drop isn’t quite so steep, about 4.1 percent, when money lost from the end of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act was not taken into account, but that distinction doesn’t lessen the overall effect. ...

For students, the likely result is higher tuition rates, which can discourage some from even attending a college or university. They also may find larger class sizes, which generally are viewed as hurting the quality of education. And institutions looking to make up the dollars may place a greater emphasis on recruiting out-of-state students, which could hurt access for in-state students and mean that a larger percentage of students will take their newly acquired skills elsewhere once they graduate or complete a program. ...

West Virginia, for example, actually boosted higher education spending in the past year, by 1.7 percent when the stimulus money is counted. The Mountain State even invested more of its own money, to the tune of 8.8 percent. The higher contributions have been reflected in such things as matching money raised for research at Marshall University and West Virginia University, as well as efforts to strengthen the state’s community and technical colleges to better develop the skills of the state’s workforce. With a goal of increasing the educational attainment level of its citizens, such investments are crucial. ...

But those efforts can only go so far. There’s no question that the states’ budget challenges are real, and many needs vie for the dollars at hand when lawmakers set their budgets. But we urge them to at least maintain their commitments to colleges and universities because educational gains are so important to both the states’ and nation’s future.

—Distributed by The Associated Press