Florida’s Great Cost Shift: How Higher Education Cuts Undermine Its Future Middle Class

State support for higher education has decreased considerably over the past twenty years, while financial aid policies have increasingly abandoned students with the greatest financial need. As a result students and their families now pay—or borrow—a lot more for a college degree that benefits all of us. This report examines how state disinvestment in public higher education over the past two decades has shifted costs to students and their families. The report outlines how such disinvestment has occurred alongside rapidly rising enrollments and demographic shifts that are yielding more economically, racially, and ethnically diverse student bodies. This fact sheet, produced jointly with the Research Institute on Social and Economic Policy at Florida International University, highlights Florida’s funding for higher education trends over the last twenty years.