New higher education cuts in Kansas slash more deeply from research universities, highlighting the question of whether large institutions should bear the brunt of declines in state funding in order to ease the burden on their smaller sister universities.
Kansas Governor Sam Brownback approved Wednesday a 4 percent, $30.7 million cut to the state’s higher education system for the upcoming 2017 fiscal year. The cuts in higher education funding were part of a larger batch of cuttingtotaling $97 million that also included deep decreases in Medicaid spending.
Cuts to state support are nothing new for Kansas’ university system, which includes six state universities, a municipal university, 19 community colleges and six technical colleges. The state has had to regularly chop spending in recent years amid declines in revenue during the tenure of Brownback, who pushed for deep tax cuts passed in 2012. But the latest round of cutting is notable in that lawmakers introduced a new formula changing the way higher education cuts translate to individual universities.
Read more at Inside Higher Ed: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/05/23/kansas-cuts-criticized-hurting-large-research-universities