Mississippi HBCUs could be hurt by new performance-based college funding formula
The board that governs Mississippi’s eight public universities voted June 18 to move toward a funding formula that would tie state dollars to graduation rates, student retention and how much graduates earn.
The method for determining the latter has not been clarified. For now, it exists only on paper, and there are potential complications, such as how to measure graduate earnings and whether, for example, graduates’ decisions to pursue public service rather than more lucrative endeavors could contribute to funding penalties for their universities.
The Institutions of Higher Learning Board of Trustees will take up the model again at its August meeting, and lawmakers who shelved their own version of the idea this year plan to return to it in 2027. The change would replace a formula that gives every university the same percentage increase regardless of outcomes.
Some lawmakers have already warned that measuring universities this way could penalize Jackson State University, Alcorn State University and Mississippi Valley State University because the metrics take no account of the decades those schools went underfunded by the state.
That underfunding is documented. In 1975, Jake Ayers Sr., a civil rights activist from Glen Allan, sued Mississippi on behalf of his son, a Jackson State student, arguing that the state ran one system of higher education for white students and another for Black students. The suit became a class action. The United States intervened, as did Bennie Thompson, who later was elected to Congress representing the 2nd District. The case went to trial in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on it in 1992, and in 1995 a federal district court found that vestiges of segregation remained in the state’s university system.
Mississippi settled in 2002, over the objections of the Ayers family, agreeing to pay $503 million during 17 years to the three universities. The package included $246 million for academic programs, $75 million for buildings, a $70 million public endowment and a $35 million private one. The universities could not draw on the endowment income until each campus enrolled at least 10 percent non-Black students for three consecutive years.
The state’s obligation ended in 2022. Whether the money closed the gap is disputed. Ivory Phillips, a 1963 Jackson State graduate, dean emeritus of the university’s College of Education and a consultant on the case, has said the three universities received roughly $400 million of the advertised figure, with the rest going to endowments that they could not control and to attorneys’ fees. By one accounting, $1 million of the $35 million private endowment had been raised.
The framework the board accepted has two parts, according to an IHL release issued after the vote. The first is foundational funding, which the release describes as a data-driven calculation of what each university needs to keep its doors open, maintain its facilities, deliver its academic programs and support students who face the greatest barriers to completion. The second is performance funding, structured so that institutions meeting foundational thresholds can receive new state dollars only by showing improvement on agreed-upon outcomes. The recommended measures are degree completion, student progression and workforce outcomes, calibrated differently for research and comprehensive institutions.
Trustee Charlie Stephenson, who chairs the board’s Finance and Budget Committee, was quoted in the release saying the framework would shape what the board requests from the legislature. “Mississippi’s public universities have shifted from being primarily state supported to primarily tuition supported,” Stephenson said. “As we prepare Mississippi’s next generation workforce, we will use this framework to request multi-year recurring appropriations increases that buy down tuition pressure for Mississippi families in exchange for data driven, measurable improvement and performance excellence.”
Steven Cunningham, president of the board of trustees, said in the same release that the framework moves the state closer to a funding model matched to what its universities produce. “We have put a great deal of time and effort into getting to this point,” he said.
The measures under consideration are shaped by resources. Graduation and progression rates reflect what a campus can spend on advising, tutoring, scholarships and summer programs, and the financial pressure its students carry. Workforce outcomes follow from the academic programs a university is able to offer; building those programs is what the largest share of the Ayers money paid for. How much the foundational floor accounts for that history, and how the board measures which students face the greatest barriers will determine how far the new formula moves money.
Mississippi has tried this before. The board worked with the same consultant in 2014 and 2015 on a formula built on weighted credit-hour production, and that version carried a hold-harmless provision to keep any university from losing money in the transition. LeAnne Robinson, director of the Legislative Budget Office, described that history to the Senate Universities and Colleges Committee in December.
Lawmakers set their own bill aside this year to wait for the board. Rep. Donnie Scoggin (R-Ellisville), who chairs the House Universities and Colleges Committee, told the committee in February that he would not move a performance-funding bill while the consultant was still working. “I don’t want to take up a bill that’s going to interfere with them coming up with a funding formula,” he said.
The board is scheduled to continue the discussion in August and has not said when it will vote. The legislature will take up the question in 2027, 52 years after Jake Ayers filed suit.
Image: Gibbs-Green Plaza on the campus of Jackson State University (via Wikimedia Commons)
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