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of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

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    Data Dashboard

    Higher Education Finance

    The visualizations in this dashboard compare financial support for higher education in Pennsylvania to that of other states from 2014 to 2024. It also provides information on the percentage of total cost born by students.  State support can take the form of direct appropriations and state-sourced financial aid to both public and independent higher education institutions. Unless noted, values are reported separately by these two types of institutions. Net tuition per FTE, which is calculated by subtracting state-funded student financial aid, institutional tuition discounts and waivers from tuition revenue and dividing by FTE enrollment, is also shown for public higher education institutions only.

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    Data for this dashboard are sourced from the State Higher Education Executive Officer’s (SHEEO) State Higher Education Finance Survey (SHEF), which is administered annually to states. These data track how states fund higher education via both financial aid and direct appropriations, as well as measure the share of higher education revenue that comes from undergraduate and graduate students’ tuition and fees after state-funded student financial aid. They can be found at: shef.sheeo.org/data-downloads.

    The SHEF dataset also utilizes enrollment data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Enrollment survey. IPEDS is a federal survey system administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), an office of the U.S. Department of Education.

    SHEF reports state revenue sources for two separate, broad institution types: public institutions and independent institutions. Public institutions are any university or community college that is either owned by the state or designated as state-related, and that is authorized to operate under state law and regulations. In Pennsylvania, PASSHE, state-related universities and their regional campuses, community colleges, Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology, and the Northern Pennsylvania Regional College are public-supported institutions. Independent institutions include independent, non-profit, four-year colleges and universities and for-profit institutions whose students are eligible for state-funded student financial aid.

    A Technical Appendix provides detailed information about all data sources, data elements, and analyses utilized in the creation of these dashboards. A set of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) are also provided to address common questions about the dashboards.