Chapter 5: Toward Equitable and Adequate Public Funding for Community Colleges: Lessons from K–12 Education Finance

Community colleges are at the forefront of efforts to expand access to postsecondary educational opportunities—especially for student groups who historically have been underrepresented in higher education (Shapiro et al., 2012). Yet, at the same time, there are mounting concerns about whether community colleges have necessary funding to meet these goals (Baum & Kurose, 2013; Dowd & Shieh, 2014; Kahlenberg et al., 2018). In recent years, public funding for community colleges has steadily declined, with cuts impacting colleges that have more limited capacity to raise revenues by increasing tuition and those that serve students with greater need (Romano & Palmer, 2016). There are also longstanding questions about whether existing funding formulae for community colleges are fair, with colleges serving the greatest concentrations of higher need students having fewer resources than those that serve more advantaged student groups (Dowd, 2004; Dowd & Grant, 2006; Kolbe & Baker, 2018).