Counting Past Each Other: How Inconsistent Reporting Creates Confusion About Higher Education Finance

This paper is a follow-up to Securing the Public Trust, a January 2017 report from College Futures Foundation. That report found that inconsistencies in fiscal metrics between public institutions and state policymakers contribute to a lack of common understanding about funding challenges and steps needed to address them. The report recommends the development of a small set of commonly defined key indicators on resource use and performance. These build off of but are different from the more detailed accounting data that are collected and reported by the institutions.

This brief illustrates why consistent and meaningful metrics are needed and where they are missing. It recommends a short list of metrics focused on state/system-level decision-making about revenues and expenditures, outcomes, cost drivers, and tradeoffs between spending in key areas. The brief
benefits from discussions with higher education fiscal experts at the California State Department of Finance, the Legislative Analyst’s Office, and the California State University as well as many others.