Strategic Finance

Fund what works and what matters. Equip community colleges with sufficient resources and appropriate incentives to scale evidence-based reforms for improving student success and talent development.

Recommendation 11

Strategic Finance

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States should treat community colleges as the foundation of their talent development systems and invest in them accordingly. In fact, community colleges should receive more public resources than four-year institutions because their mission demands that they keep tuition affordable, but in many states, they make do with a fraction of the revenue that flagship universities collect. As a result, community colleges are limited in the types of instructional and support programs they can offer, and low-income and underserved students get less indirect support from the state than their peers at other institutions.


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States should fund community colleges adequately and create incentives to expand their student success and talent development missions. Specifically, they should do the following: Make state and local community college appropriations proportionate with those of four-year institutions, award grants to seed implementation and expansion of programmatic strategies, create tax incentives to stimulate charitable giving to community colleges, and design outcomes-based funding schemes that reward colleges for strong performances, particularly in boosting outcomes for underserved populations.