Illinois Commission on Equitable Funding Misfired on Addressing Inequalities in Higher Education
The commission’s recommendations for the highest funded university system in the nation deliberately discriminates against white and Asian students while doing nothing to address the reason for inequity in university outcomes and the lack of quality K-12 school choices for low income families
If you are not aware, higher education in Illinois is racist. This is the conclusion drawn by a new commission established to “adequately, equitably, and stably fund public universities in this State and to evaluate existing funding methods.”
The Illinois Commission on Equitable Public University Funding has called for recommending that another $1.4 billion in new funding to meet the goals stated in the report. Included in the recommendation is that to address inequity in higher education, additional funding based be provided. This is not only misguided but also ignores the primary cause of inequities: the lack of school choice at the K-12 level.
Illinois Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford (D-Westchester) introduced the legislation, S.B. 3965, on July 30. State Representative Carol Ammons (D-Urbana) introduced the bill in the House which will adopt recommendations made by the commission including granting public institutions of higher education $6,000 per each black or American Indian student they accept, $4,000 per Hispanic student, and $0 for white and Asian students.
The commission’s recommendations seem to fly in the face of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on student loans, which essentially said universities cannot use a race-based approach to redress the damage from the present-day consequences of historical racism. While the court closed the door on the use of race as a plus factor in making decisions, it specifically left available every other social economic factor in the pursuit of equity.
Illinois currently ranks number one in state support for higher education, providing nearly $23,000 in funding per student to its universities. This is an increase of 55 percent from the 2012 level of $14,975. Illinois state funding per student is a whopping 167 percent greater than the U.S. average of $10,237. The next closest state is Alaska at $18,436. However, this can be misleading as only a third of the funding comes from the state with the rest coming from tuition and fees and much of the state going not to education but to fund pensions.
Growing pension contributions to the State Universities Retirement System (SURS) have forced Illinois’ higher education institutions to divert more dollars to pensions. A 2009 budget summary shows just over seven cents of each higher education dollar from state general funds went to pay for faculty pensions rather than supporting instructors and students in the classrooms. In 2024, those pension payments to the SURS consumed 43 cents of every higher education dollar from state general funds.
Unsurprisingly, the commission does not directly address the underfunding of the pension system other than to ask for an overall increase in funding and the special allocation by race. Neither does it address the overly generous benefits that are contributing to driving up costs. The system’s top 100 pensioners alone received $34.7 million in combined retirement income in FY 2023, according to information that had to be secured through a Freedom of Information Act request.
The Commission on Equitable Public University Funding was established under the premise that Illinois higher education is systemically racist and that more funding is the solution. The commission acknowledges that it is building upon the passage of the Evidenced-Based Funding (EBF) formula in 2017, which changed how K-12 education in Illinois is funded. This formula pushed billions of new funds to local schools based on the notion that schools are underfunded, and that if they were adequately funded, academic success would follow.
The Equity Adjustment Funding model, like the EBF model, includes a hold harmless provision in the funding formula, which ensures that base funding never drops at any university. This provision reduces the pressure to consolidate and right-size campuses. Bureaucrats sell this increased funding by wrapping it in equity arguments, asserting that universities cannot address equity issues because they are underfunded.
On page 25 of the report, the commission shows the numbers for one of the Equity Adjustments in the new funding formula. This provision aims to incentivize universities to admit minorities for greater funding. Under this formula, the value for black students is placed at $6,000, Hispanics at $4,000, and a rural student at $2,000. If a black rural student is admitted, the "Equity Adjustment" is a maximum of $8,000. SB 3965 and its identical legislation in the House aims to write this recommendation into law.
The commission’s recommendations ignore the impact poor performing K-12 schools have on minority students higher education outcomes.
The commission’s evidence of systemic racism is based on enrollment numbers and graduation rates by demographic. However, there was no attempt to examine the K-12 preparatory experience of students who graduated or failed to graduate. The commission is silent though on the poor performance of public school children statewide. Strangely, the panel makes no mention of the fact only 34.6 percent of students proficient in reading and 26.9 percent in math in 2023. Chicago's test scores are worse with 26 percent of students proficient in reading and 17.5 percent in math.
The commission has remained quiet on Illinois’ drift away from high academic standards and school accountability while the state took legislative action to limit, if not roll back public school choice by abolishing the state’s independent state charter school commission that approved and protected public charter schools and by signing the charter neutrality legislation enabling the CTU to weaken charters. Meanwhile, the state took no action to renew the state’s modest "Invest in Kids" private school scholarship program.
In Chicago, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) dismisses testing as “junk science rooted in white supremacy,” as the district decides to stop ranking schools by academic performance while working to eliminate public school choice. The CTU’s campaign to gut school choice includes charter schools and both select-enrollment and magnet schools which offer Chicago’s poorest families — overwhelmingly black and Latino — the only alternatives to the city’s failing neighborhood schools.
Expanded college loan programs combined with the failures of K-12 public education only widen opportunities for failure. If the critics of the Supreme Court’s decision invalidating student loan forgiveness and the striking down of affirmative action in college admissions are driven by a desire to achieve equity through expanded higher education opportunities, you would not know it from their opposition to K-12 school choice. Yet opponents of school choice continue to wage war on K-12 families, even when programs are for the specific benefit of low-income students.
School choice is welcomed at the higher education level for federal and state student financial aid.
Contrary to what teachers unions claim, government funding is not exclusive to public education. There are a plethora of programs that support private education services including Head Start, Federal Pell grants. Illinois’ own Monetary Award Program grants are awarded based on a student’s financial need to pay for tuition and other post-secondary educational expenses. Over 54 percent of students enrolled in private colleges and universities have federal student loan debt.
The K-12 public education system is regressive and denies poor children, disproportionately black and Latino, quality school choices. The great irony here is the absence of quality school choices only adds to the challenges and obstacles students from poorer families face to fully benefit from expanded higher education. In contrast to profiting from opportunities college loans provide and affirmative action admissions, denial of K-12 school choice is only expanding the arena of failure. This is reflected in significant and persistent college graduation gap between races.
National data speaks to the superior performance of K-12 minority students who attend public charter or private schools. Stanford's Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) tracks public charter outcomes of two million students in 29 states over 15 years, concluding that charter schools produce superior student gains. CREDO’s interpretations also revealed students enrolled in charter or private schools outperformed peers in math and reading, despite enrolling a more challenging student population.
Equally compelling is research by the preeminent economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell. In his 2020 book, “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” Sowell focused on more than 100 New York City schools where both charter and traditional public school students shared the same building. Both studies show black and Hispanic students in charter schools advancing more than their traditional public school peers by large margins in both math and reading.
Meanwhile Catholic schools have enjoyed extraordinary success. According to a data analysis performed by Kathleen Porter-Magee, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, “If Catholic schools were a state, they would be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) bills itself as the “nation’s report card,” and has been handing out grades since 1969. Results show Catholic schools exceeded both public schools and charter schools by wide margins.
The Archdiocese of Chicago Catholic schools showed similar results, with students defying the national trend of pandemic-related stagnation and decline in academics. Low-income students in Illinois who received scholarships from the Invest in Kids scholarship program were proficient in reading and math at a higher rate in nearly every grade compared to low-income, public-school students in Illinois.
As for critics who claim that Catholic school scores were simply a product of a higher socio-economic status enjoyed by their students, and a selection bias favoring higher achieving whites for admission, the data shows Catholic schools outperformed national, charter, and public-school averages for black, Hispanic, and low-income students as well -- on all four NAEP tests, disproving the lie to selection bias.
The success of school choice is a story of unique, individualized learning experiences, not one of family wealth or selection bias. The Commission on Equitable Public University Funding's accusation of systemic racism in higher education while ignoring the role of the systematic efforts to deny quality K-12 school choices to poor families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, is scholarly malpractice. What is more racist than engaging in policies that severely limit quality school choices for the children of Black and Latino families?
It is sufficiently clear that too few students, disproportionately black and Latino, are receiving the preparation they need to complete a university degree. This fault to prepare students does not rest with colleges; quite the contrary, the blame rests entirely with our public elementary and secondary schools. The denial of quality education choices at the K-12 level undermines college preparedness. The consequences of the absence of quality school choices are painfully visible in the college debt crisis, particularly among blacks.
The college loan program, combined with a lack of preparedness only widened the opportunity for failure while orchestrating debt addiction that effectively taxes college graduates far beyond the legitimate costs of their college education. Neither throwing more money at the university system nor providing generous state subsidies for Black and Latino students will achieve the desired equity of outcome in the absence of a commitment to provide poor families quality K-12 school choices.
