The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 provided nearly $48.6 billion in direct aid to states in the form of the State Fiscal Stabilization Fund. The program was designed to help states maintain support for public K-12 and higher education spending. A report published by the New America Foundation, “
“Our findings show that K-12 education received the lion’s share of Education Stabilization funds,” the authors conclude. “Still, these funds played a significant role in higher education funding in many states in 2009, 2010 and 2011. This suggests that states did not protect higher education from budget cuts during the economic downturn and in some cases made larger cuts to higher education than K-12 education.”
On average, states allocated 78.9% of the funds to K-12, only 21.1% to higher ed. Virginia was something of an outlier, allocating 67.6% to schools and 32.4% to higher ed.
Does this say something about the relative strength of Virginia’s higher ed lobby? Or does it signify that higher ed just needed the money more than K-12?="font-weight:>
