For the last few years Nevada has been having trouble funding its state colleges. Due to reduced property and sales tax revenue Nevada government started to run short on cash. Because Nevada doesn’t have a personal or corporate income tax it’s hard for the state to raise new funds.
Now it’s developed something of a solution, if not a very generous one. According to a piece by Jon Marcus at The Hechinger Report:
Nevada public universities would be funded based on how many credits their students complete, rather than how many students they enroll, under a dramatic change in policy recommended Wednesday by a legislative committee.
While the concept the committee approved, which is called performance funding, isn’t new, Nevada’s version would be among the most dramatic. It would allocate 100 percent of the state’s base annual budget for higher education by calculating the number of completed credits. That is, money now parceled out based on how many students enroll would instead be distributed in response to how many complete their classes.
Many other states have introduced plans to fund public universities based on student achievement and other measures, but in other states performance funding represents only a potion of total state allocations.
While this is billed as a way to encourage achievement—“We want to fund institutions based on student success,” said State Senator Steven Horsford, according to the article—it actually looks like a way to merely justify cuts, and pass more costs to Nevada students.
Marcus explains that the formula would also allow state colleges to set their own tuitions and keep all of the revenue. Current policy requires state colleges to submit all tuition collected to the state’s general fund. Nevada then allocates the money back to all colleges in the state. This means that the state’s bigger schools, in the southern part of the state, subsidize those in the North.
As Nevada Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich pointed out in 2010, the state did have other options to increase funds, options that would have prevented tuition hikes. If Nevada increased the state sales tax by a mere one quarter of one percent, which amounts to roughly $12.50 per person a year, the state would take in about $88 million in new funding.
