A new study claims that increased state funding will increase college enrollment, which will in turn bring billions in economic gains to the state.
A group named Education Forward Arizona says that if enrollment at Arizona’s three public universities is increased by 20 percent through increased state funding, $5 billion in economic gains will accrue to the state.
This was covered in a news story in the Arizona Daily Star on July 9, 2024: “Upping Arizona college enrollment could mean $5B economic gain, group says.”
Let’s see if there is merit to what the group says.
As with claims by any group on any subject, the first step is to research what the group’s biases and self-interest might be. Is the group partisan or nonpartisan? Does it lean left or right? Do board members and research staff have a vested interest in the study findings? Are they part of the establishment that caused the problem under study in the first place?
Since these are largely subjective questions, I’ll keep most of my opinions of the group to myself so that you can conduct your own research and form your own opinion. The only observation that I’ll share is that the group strikes me as being rooted in the establishment. That’s not necessarily a negative, unless you believe as I do that American universities are at an inflection point and in need of redefining their mission, structure, governance, and operations. Such changes probably won’t come from the establishment.
On a related note, the more that universities are seen as being out of the mainstream, the more difficult it is for them to obtain additional funding from taxpayers. Biting the hand that feeds them, they embrace postmodernism, moral relativism, critical race theory, illiberalism, neo-Marxism, speech codes, unabashed partisanship, the brazen discrimination underlying DEI, and a departure from reason and scholarship.
That’s probably not a good way of winning over the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of the general public.
Let’s turn now to the premises and statistics of Education Forward Arizona.
The premises are a) that college enrollment will increase with an increase in state funding for higher education, and b) that an increase in enrollment will result in billions in economic gains for the state.
It’s not possible to test these premises in a longitudinal study that controls for all of the variables affecting enrollment and economics and that distinguishes between cause and effect and between causation and correlation.
Not only that, but enrollment is a questionable measure. Graduation rates would seem to be a better measure. But to focus on enrollment for a moment, one way of increasing the enrollment of the state’s residents would be to decrease the enrollment of foreign students.
According to the Daily Star story, it will be difficult to increase enrollment in state universities, because “appropriations for public higher education per student in fiscal year 2022 was 39.1% less in Arizona than the national average and ranked 49th among the 50 states, only beating out New Hampshire.”
One problem with these numbers is that they compare Arizona’s spending to other states in absolute dollars without regard to how wealthy or poor a state might be. A different ranking might result from comparing Arizona to other states on a different measure—on, let’s say, on how much the state spends on higher education as a percent of the personal income in the state.
In any event, the relationship between spending on higher education and economic gain seems suspect when comparing states. Take Arizona and New Hampshire. Although New Hampshire spends less per college student than Arizona, it ranks better on the following measures:
| New Hampshire | Arizona | |
| Residents with Bachelor’s | 23.7% | 19.3% |
| Residents with Master’s | 14.9% | 11.9% |
| Poverty Rate | 7.4% | 13.5% |
| Median Household Income | $83,449 | $65,913 |
Source: World Population Review
These differences might be explained by differences in the racial makeup between New Hampshire and Arizona. But that brings up the emotional issue of race, an issue that can be easily misunderstood and used by race hucksters for divisive purposes.
Making the subject of race even more problematic is the fact that the seven official categories of race (and ethnicity) are woefully inadequate and misleading in describing the rich diversity of the world and the U.S. I’m referring to these seven: White, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, and Middle Eastern.
The dilemma is that although the categories are problematic, they have to be used because they are the way that racial and ethnic statistics are gathered and classified in the U.S.
Using five of the seven categories, the following is the racial/ethnic composition of New Hampshire and Arizona:
| New Hampshire | Arizona | |
| Non-Hispanic White | 88.5% | 53.4% |
| Black | 2.1% | 5.7% |
| Hispanic | 4.8% | 31.6% |
| Asian | 3.1% | 4.1% |
| Native American | 0.3% | 5.2% |
Source: Census Bureau
College graduation rates and income are highest across the nation for Asians and second-highest for non-Hispanic Whites.
Consequently, states with a high combination of these two groups and a lower combination of the other groups will tend to rank higher in graduation rates and income. For New Hampshire, as can be seen in the above table, Asians and non-Hispanic Whites comprise 91.6% of the population. For Arizona, these two groups comprise 57.5% of the population.
Naturally, in keeping with modern journalistic convention, the Arizona Daily Star interjected race into the story in a way that made it appear that so-called minority groups were somehow being screwed. To wit:
Postsecondary education attainment opportunities are also often decided by race and ethnicity, according to the polling. Fifty-three percent of Latinx respondents and 50% of all people of color said they prioritized work over postsecondary education because they needed to financially support others such as children, parents or grandparents. That compares to 39% of white respondents.
I lived in the barrio of San Antonio for five years, used to date a Mexican woman, and have lived in southern Arizona for 35 years. Yet I’m unclear as to what a Latinx is or how Latinx respondents are identified and queried. I sense that “Latinx” is another I.D. badge in identity politics and another category in the victimhood Olympics.
At the risk of being cancelled, I’ll add this: As the grandson of poor and poorly educated immigrants and the son of working-class parents—all of whom were seen as non-White for the first half of the twentieth century—I don’t find anything extraordinary or suspect about certain groups having to prioritize work over postsecondary education as they slowly climb the socioeconomic ladder.
In keeping with another modern journalistic convention, the Arizona Daily Star had to bring gender into the story and make it seem as if women have it worse than men. To wit: “In the new survey, 60% of women polled said the cost of completing a postsecondary degree was too expensive, compared to 53% of men.”
Funny thing, but more women than men are graduating from college nowadays.
Additionally, the story stated that “62% of Pima Country residents surveyed said they found postsecondary educational opportunities to be too costly, compared to 54% of those in Maricopa County.”
No surprise that Pima County residents said this. The one-party monopoly in metro Tucson and surrounding Pima County has embraced socioeconomic policies for decades that have kept the metropolis an economic laggard shunned by high-wage companies and corporate headquarters. Also, many Tucsonans would rather see Tucson mired in poverty and blight than to be like metro Phoenix.
Certainly, the cost of a college degree has become too expensive, but there are more reasons for this situation than a lack of state funding. There is the ballooning administrative overhead in universities, stemming from a bureaucratic mindset coupled with ever-growing federal and state regulations. There is the money sloshing around from the tuition loan scam, money that has made universities insensitive to costs. And there are the Taj Mahal residence halls and other facilities, as well as money-losing sports teams and their extravagant facilities.
Incidentally, I have some inside knowledge of the University of Arizona. A former provost at the university was a client of my former management consulting firm. And my son earned a bachelor’s and a master’s in engineering at the university—at minimal cost, due to working as a residence hall assistant in a bareboned dorm built in the 1930s, due to fixing his own meals, and due to striving to obtain scholarships, grants and internships.
This means that I’m eminently qualified to conclude that my ideas would result in the state gaining $50 billion.
See, I can make up numbers, too.
Mr. Cantoni can be reached at [email protected].
