Higher ed: Enrollment challenge, spending advantage (revised)

In the 2008 academic year, Kentucky public higher education lost ground on enrollment. We ranked:

• 50th for our one-year change in full-time equivalent enrollment, with our enrollment dropping more than two percent while national enrollment increased.
  
• 44th for five-year change in full-time equivalent enrollment, with a one percent increase while the national figure grew seven times as fast.

Meanwhile, Kentucky spending per full-time equivalent student continued to be stronger than the nation.

• 6th in adjusted net tuition paid by students and their families.
• 11th in adjusted public appropriations.
• 4th for adjusted total education revenue.

The "adjusted" element there revises state figures for differences in enrollment and cost-of-living. Without that adjustment, Kentucky ranked 11th in total education revenue per full-time equivalent student.

These new results come from State Higher Education Finance 2008, the newest in a long-standing series of annual reports from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, available here. In April, I blogged the “early release” version of the enrollment decline here.

For number-lovers, here are the Kentucky enrollment and funding numbers:

Revision note: the paragraph in italics was missing when I first published this post.