Plan to overhaul higher education funding meets U of I opposition

By Editor | May 8, 2025 |

By Peter Hancock

Capitol News Illinois

A plan to overhaul the way Illinois funds public universities is running into stiff opposition from the state’s largest higher education institution, the University of Illinois System.

The plan, which has been in development for the last four years, calls for adding roughly $1.7 billion in new university funding over the next 10-15 years, but distributing that under a formula that would give priority to schools that are currently the least adequately funded.

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, D-Westchester, the lead sponsor of Senate Bill 13, said it is designed to bring equity and stability to the state’s higher education system.

“This bill does not just aim to increase funding,” she told a Senate committee Wednesday. “It tells us for the first time in our state’s history what students and universities need to succeed and how to adequately fund universities over time to actually meet that need. It defines what universities require to educate, support and graduate students successfully, and then it directs resources to do just that.”

But Nick Jones, executive vice president and vice president of academic affairs for the U of I System, said the proposed formula would be detrimental to the state’s flagship university and that it needs considerably more work before it can be ready for legislative approval.

“The University of Illinois system is absolutely dedicated to expanding equitable access, enhancing student success and promoting statewide economic growth,” he told the committee. “The proposed legislation penalizes institutions that provide the most support for underrepresented and rural students while failing to ensure long-term access.”

History of underfunding

The proposal is a product of a commission that lawmakers established in 2021 — the Illinois Commission on Equitable Public Education Funding. The commission grew out of the Legislative Black Caucus’ efforts that year to enact sweeping social and racial justice reforms in the wake of unrest that followed the killing of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police the previous summer.

“Every university participated in the commission, and the work of the commission acknowledged that Illinois has never had a systemic approach to university funding, nor one that is rooted in student or institutional need,” Lightford said. “Instead, it has been a largely political process.”

Robin Steans, executive director of the advocacy group Advance Illinois, which took part in the commission, said Illinois went through a decadeslong period of steadily cutting its support for higher education, resulting in a system she said is so underfunded it can no longer be sustained.

As recently as 2000, she said, state funding for universities covered about 75% of their overall costs. Today, she said, state funding covers only about 35%, far below the national average of 60%.

“And the only place to go to make that up is tuition,” she said. “And so the lower we go, the more we’re pushing those costs to students, pricing them out and driving them out.”

Proposed new formula

The proposed formula would operate much like the Evidence-Based Funding formula, or EBF, that lawmakers adopted in 2017 for K-12 education.

It would start with determining an “adequacy target” for each school to reflect how much they need to meet their educational missions. That would include such things as the cost of instruction and student services, operation and maintenance of physical facilities, and costs associated with meeting the school’s research and public service missions.

Like the EBF formula, that calculation also would take into account the unique attributes of each school’s student body and the higher costs associated with educating certain demographic groups, referred to in the bill as “underrepresented students.”

The formula then measures each school’s “resource profile” – the money it has available from sources such as state aid, tuition and fees, to cover the costs included in its adequacy target.

Those two calculations are used to determine each school’s “adequacy percentage,” which reflects the degree to which a school is underfunded, and its “adequacy gap,” the dollar figure reflecting the difference between its adequacy target and available resources.

According to preliminary calculations made public Wednesday, Western Illinois University in Macomb would rank as the most underfunded public university in Illinois on a percentage basis, with current resources meeting only 45.7% of its adequacy target. But because WIU is relatively small, its total “adequacy gap” would be just $104.3 million, ranking seventh among individual campuses.

In terms of total dollars, the University of Illinois Chicago would have the largest adequacy gap of any campus, at nearly $475.5 million.

Meanwhile, the state’s flagship university, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, would rank as the best-funded university in the state, at 88.6% of adequacy. But because of its size – with total enrollment in the fall 2024 semester of more than 56,000 – its total adequacy gap would rank fifth among all campuses, at $137.4 million.

U of I opposition

“Although we support several of the key aspirational goals of the bill, we do not agree with the methodology proposed to achieve those goals,” Jones, of the U of I System, told the committee. “Nor do we agree that this will provide what the University of Illinois needs to succeed.”

Jones noted the U of I System as a whole – including the Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield campuses – enroll more than half of all public university students in Illinois, including 45% of all those who qualify for Pell grants, the federal need-based financial aid program for higher education. And yet, under the proposed formula, he said the U of I System would receive only 28% of any new funding provided in the first year of the program.

In addition, he said the proposal also includes a formula for allocating any potential funding cuts that could happen in future years, one that would protect schools that are least adequately funded while requiring those closest to their adequacy target to bear the brunt of the cuts. Under that formula, the U of I System would absorb 74% of any future funding cuts.

“The University of Illinois system would support adopting a tiered, mission-aligned approach that better recognizes the distinct missions of the universities and equitably funds institutions based on their specific needs and contributions to student success and the state’s economic priorities,” Jones said. “This approach would ensure that funding supports student outcomes holds institutions accountable for results and drives true equitable distribution of the state’s investment in higher education.”

The Senate committee took no action on the bill Wednesday. An identical bill, House Bill 1581, is pending in the House. It is sponsored by Rep. Carol Ammons, D-Urbana, and is cosponsored by House Speaker Emanuel “Chris” Welch, D-Hillside, and Rep. Katie Stuart, D-Edwardsville, who chairs the House higher education budget committee.

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.