The college crisis

When University of Illinois Springfield recently was designated Illinois’ top regional state university, it was a dose of good news on a campus that has seen its enrollment drop by more than 800 students during the last decade.

UIS is reviewing programs and pondering whether they continue to serve student needs, Chancellor Janet Gooch told Illinois Times. It’s a situation almost all of the state’s regional institutions find themselves in.

There is no precise definition for what constitutes a “regional university” or a “flagship” institution, said Cecilia Orphan, an associate professor of higher education at University of Denver who studies regional universities.

“A good but imprecise rule of thumb is regional schools are the state universities with either a direction or a city in their name,” she said.

In Illinois, University of Illinois campuses in Champaign-Urbana and Chicago are generally considered flagships. The remaining 10 state universities are often labeled as regional institutions.

And it is at these regional institutions that a crisis is brewing. In 2010, a combined 112,200 students attended those schools. But today, that number has dropped to 71,600 – a 36% decrease. During the same period, enrollment at University of Illinois’ flagship campuses soared from 71,700 to 90,100 – a 26% increase.

These changes have left college towns such as Macomb, Carbondale and Charleston struggling.

A front-page Wall Street Journal article last month painted Western Illinois University and Macomb in almost post-apocalyptic terms:

“At Western Illinois University, an empty dorm that once held 800 students is now a police training ground, where active-shooter drills have left behind overturned furniture, rubber-tipped bullets and paintball casings.

“Nearby dorms have been razed to weedy fields. Two more dorms are set to close this summer. Frat houses and homes once filled with student renters are empty lots. City streets used to be so crowded during the semester that cars moved at a crawl. No more.”

Much the same could be said of Southern Illinois University’s Carbondale campus, said Jim Nowlan, a retired professor who writes extensively about higher education.

“They have gone from a high of 22,000 students to about 11,000, and that includes online students. Carbondale is a long way from anywhere,” he said.

But Kirk Dillard, a former state senator from the Chicago suburbs and a member of WIU’s board of trustees, noted that Macomb and Carbondale are no more remote today than they were when their enrollments were at their peaks. And other regional schools such as Chicago State and Northeasten, which are in the heart of the state’s largest metropolitan area, are struggling as much as or more than their rural counterparts.

Chicago State’s enrollment has dropped from 7,040 in 2003 to 2,328. At Northeastern, which is also in Chicago, enrollment dropped from 11,825 to 5,504 during that same time period.

Dillard, who was a Republican state senator for 21 years, said other factors are contributing to the decline of almost all of Illinois’ regional universities. Among the causes he cited are:

Decades of state underfunding has forced universities to escalate tuition, pricing out many students.

Enrollment growth at University of Illinois’ Chicago and Champaign-Urbana campuses has been at the expense of other state universities.

There are fewer high school students today, which makes for a shallower pool from which universities can draw.

Colleges in neighboring states are aggressively recruiting Illinois high school students.

More students are choosing to forgo college and enter the workforce directly or join a vocational training program.

Dillard said of all these factors, the most devastating has been decades of underfunding by the state.

State underfunds higher education

Nowlan noted that when adjusted for inflation, state funding for higher education is less than half the level it was in 2000.

Illinois State University President Aondover Tarhule  said, “The cost of running a university depends on how much you get from the state and how much parents and students pay. In Illinois, we have been disinvesting – in terms of the amount of money the state gives to the universities – over the last two, three decades. Other states have not disinvested to the same degree.”

Tarhule noted that in the 1970s, Illinois taxpayers paid 70% of the cost of educating a state university student. Today, taxpayers are covering only 20% of the cost, he said.

When the state contributes less, students and their parents are expected to make up the difference with higher tuition bills. This makes Illinois schools less competitive with state universities in neighboring states, he said.

Nowlan agreed, saying, “There has been a dramatic increase over the past 20 years in the numbers of Illinois high school graduates going out of state. Other states saw an opportunity because of the high tuition (in Illinois) and said, ‘Look, come to Iowa. Come to Iowa State. We’ll give you a package that costs less than Illinois schools.’ These schools have good brand names: Iowa, Iowa State, the University of Wisconsin. They very consciously are poaching Illinois students.”

Tarhule noted that Illinois ranks near the top in the nation for the number of students who leave to attend colleges elsewhere.

“We are a net exporter of students. We are No. 2 in the whole country in terms of states that export students to other states,” he said. “New Jersey is No. 1. We are No. 2. So, we are losing a lot of our future tax base and our talent base. From a policy point of view, it makes no sense at all that the state is allowing this to continue.”

Changing demographics

Southern Illinois University President Dan Mahoney said demographic changes are also making it more difficult to recruit students.

“Illinois is not any different than what you see in a lot of states across the country, with a few exceptions where they’ve had huge growth in high school seniors – places like Florida and Texas,” he said. “But in most states, regional universities have lost enrollment over the last 10 to 15 years.”

Don Sevener, who was a senior executive with the Illinois Board of Higher Education and later lobbied for Northern Illinois University, said students today are more focused on job training, at which not all of the state’s universities have excelled.

“I think a lot of young people are looking for credentials, rather than a broad-based liberal arts education,” he said. “And it’s taken the public universities a long time to understand that and accept it. And maybe some haven’t even accepted it yet. People are finding that they want value for their dollar, and in most cases – in their mind – that translates to job credentials.”

Tarhule noted Illinois State University is the only regional university where enrollment has held steady over the decades. He credits the school’s focus on workforce development.

“We are being very thoughtful about what we offer students,” he said. “We’re looking at what we think students are asking for and trying to provide that. So, we created a new college of engineering, a data science program, created a master’s in public health. These are all things we’ve done in just the last few years.”

Zack Stamp, a former Springfield resident and lobbyist who once chaired the WIU board of trustees, said the Macomb school may need to focus on the academic areas where it has traditionally excelled.

“If it wants to remain alive, which I think it does, they may want to become a specialized school where they say, ‘Look, these are the six things that we are specializing in,” Stamp said. “I am not saying that these are the right ones, but we’re going to educate teachers, we’re going to do law enforcement, we’re going to do agriculture, we’re going to do nursing. We’re not going to be everything to everybody. You’re not going to come here and get a degree in accounting. You’re not going to come here and get a degree in philosophy. You’re not going to come here and get a degree in political science.”

WIU president Kristi Mindrup said with the declining number of students graduating from Illinois high schools, the university needs to rethink whom it serves.

“Universities in general, not just Western Illinois University, have been focused on that high school population,” she said. “And so, this change presents us with an opportunity to cast a wider net and start to think more broadly about the type of students we can attract to our institutions. (We need to) think about adult student populations, working students.”

Western isn’t alone among regional universities in pondering where to focus. Gooch said UIS is also reviewing its program offerings.

“We are currently undertaking an initiative – an academic program portfolio review,” she said. “We’re looking at the programs that we offer to determine whether they are in line with market demand, student demand. That is something that we need to be sure of, that we are offering programs that are attractive to students.”

Nowlan said another factor contributing to the enrollment decline at regional universities is the growth at the University of Illinois Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses.

Ross Hodel, who was director of ISU’s Education Policy Center, said the current leadership at University of Illinois appears less concerned than previous university administrations about maintaining healthy state universities throughout Illinois.

Nowlan noted that the U of I has a smaller endowment than many other major research universities. So, it has brought in more money by expanding its student body, he said.

“The U of I has a rather modest endowment of a few billion dollars, whereas Harvard has $60 billion or $70 billion, and the Texas universities have similar amounts. So, it has to support the university and its research mission in part with numbers of undergraduate and graduate students. It’s clear they have goosed enrollment.

“It has been successful at this because it has a better brand name than regional universities. And it has strong programs in the top areas such as computer science, engineering and the sciences. They’re making the U of I very attractive and working hard to recruit the students who might have once gone to ISU. … Western, Northern or Eastern.

Competition from community colleges

Gov. JB Pritzker unsuccessfully pushed legislation this past session that would have enabled community colleges to offer four-year bachelor’s degrees.

While the measure has yet to pass, lawmakers call it a perennial issue that will certainly be considered again. If it were to pass, some believe it would further devastate enrollment at regional universities.

“It would be a devastating thing for a place like here in Springfield with a community college and the four-year regional (university) right next to each other,” said Dathan Powell, chapter president of the union representing tenured faculty at UIS.

“It doesn’t make sense for property taxes that pay for the community college to be increased just to offer another program that’s already being offered just down the road,” he said.

Powell contends Pritzker supports allowing community colleges to offer four-year degrees because the funding would come from local property taxes rather than the state budget that he is trying to balance.

But when Pritzker proposed in March having community colleges offer bachelor’s degrees he said, “We have some really terrific four-year institutions that are a vital part of the higher education system in Illinois, but we need to recognize that there are geographic, financial and accessibility constraints that close off too many students from attending those schools. With lower tuition rates and a greater presence across the state – especially in rural areas – community colleges provide the flexibility and affordability for students to pursue a quality education that works for them.”

Sevener said such a measure would be detrimental to regional universities.

“If somebody can get a bachelor’s degree from the College of Lake County, they’re not going to go to Western or even Illinois State. They’re going to stay home. And that would be a factor in accelerating the decline in enrollment,” Sevener said.

Nowlan said community colleges are pushing for this because they, too, are seeing their enrollments dropping.

“Regional universities have so many challenges,” Hodel, formerly of ISU, said. “Unless these are very narrow programs (at community colleges) it can’t be helpful. It’s another negative for the Easterns, Westerns and Southerns of the world.”

Gov. JB Pritzker got some of what he requested from the General Assembly in the area of higher education, but his biggest requests fell short.

Pritzker’s wins include a $10 million increase in need-based student financial aid and passage of a direct admission program to make it easier for eligible Illinois high school and community college students to apply to public universities.

But lawmakers did not approve the overall funding increase for universities that Pritzker requested at the start of the session, settling on a 1% bump in their operational budgets instead of the 3% the governor proposed, Pritzker’s office, however, has said there are contingencies to provide an additional 2% in the event of significant cuts in federal funding.

They also did not pass other major higher education policy initiatives, including Pritzker’s plan to allow community colleges to offer four-year bachelor’s degrees in certain high-demand career fields, and a long-sought overhaul in the way Illinois funds its public universities.

“You don’t get everything done in one year,” Pritzker said during a post-session news conference when asked about several of his initiatives that failed to pass this year. “Sometimes they (lawmakers) spend two years, four years, six years, trying to get something big done.”

Community college proposal

In his State of the State address in February, Pritzker called for allowing community colleges to offer baccalaureate degrees as a way of expanding access to those programs, especially for older, nontraditional students who may not live close to a four-year university.

“With lower tuition rates and a greater presence across the state – especially in rural areas – community colleges provide the flexibility and affordability students need,” Pritzker told the General Assembly. “This is a consumer-driven, student-centered proposal that will help fill the needs of regional employers in high-need sectors and create a pathway to stable, quality jobs for more Illinoisans.”

In the legislature, however, the proposal ran into stiff opposition from several sources, including universities that said the plan lacked sufficient safeguards to prevent community colleges from offering duplicative programs that would siphon prospective students away from their campuses.

Amid that oposition, House Bill 3717, which was carried by Rep. Tracy Katz-Muhl, D-Northbrook, failed to advance out of a key committee before a mid-session deadline in March. And even after amendments were negotiated that led to universities dropping their opposition and the bill was reassigned to a different committee, it still failed to gain enough traction to advance to the House floor.

That was mainly due to opposition from the Legislative Black Caucus, whose members said it still posed a threat to the three universities in Illinois that serve primarily Black and Latino students – Chicago State University; Governors State University, and Northeastern Illinois University – which are all located in the Chicago metropolitan area alongside multiple community colleges.

“Chicago State is hemorrhaging,” Rep. Curtis Tarver, D-Chicago, said during a May 23 House Executive Committee hearing. “And you all, as an administration, are handing them Band-Aids and they need stitches. And then you come in and you provide a bill that’s going to be even worse for them, with 11 community colleges within 25 miles of them. And I’m saying as we sit here that the Black Caucus has an issue with the bill.”

Funding overhaul

Another proposal that failed to advance called for establishing a new formula for funding public universities.

The Adequate and Equitable Public University Funding Act called for establishing a funding structure like the Evidence-Based Funding formula used for K-12 education.

That formula would use objective standards to determine an adequate level of funding for each university. The bills then called for adding as much as $1.7 billion in new funding for universities over the next 10-15 years, with most of the funding going toward schools furthest away from their adequacy target.

The proposal grew out of a commission formed in 2021 within the Illinois Board of Higher Education. That commission worked for nearly three years to develop a proposal and issued its report and recommendations to the General Assembly in March 2024.

Under the proposed formula, Western Illinois University in Macomb would have earned top priority for new funding because it is currently funded at only 46% of its adequacy target. Northeastern Illinois University and Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, at 47% of adequacy, would have been next in line.

But the state’s flagship institution, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, currently at 89% of adequacy, would rank at the bottom of the priority list. For that reason, the U of I System opposed the plan.

“The University of Illinois System is absolutely dedicated to expanding equitable access, enhancing student success and promoting statewide economic growth,” Nick Jones, executive vice president and vice president of academic affairs for the U of I System, told a Senate committee in April. “The proposed legislation penalizes institutions that provide the most support for underrepresented and rural students while failing to ensure long-term access.”

Senate Majority Leader Kimberly Lightford, D-Westchester, who sponsored the Senate bill and was a cochair of the study commission, said she was disappointed it did not pass this year, but vowed working for a more equitable funding formula.

“While it is far past time to pass an equitable funding model, I am reminded that many of the comprehensive plans I’ve passed have taken years of research, input and negotiations,” she said in an email statement. “This legislation is no different.”

Robin Steans, president of the education advocacy group Advance Illinois, who also served on the commission, said in a separate statement that she expects lawmakers to continue discussing the bill over the summer. Action could come during the fall veto session or early in the 2026 regular session, she said.

“Eventual adoption of the Adequate & Equitable Funding bill represents a significant change, one that requires new investment by our state in what remains the surest path to greater mobility and opportunity for Illinois families,” she said. “The questions and comments made during legislative committee meetings indicate that Illinois lawmakers get that, and powerful testimony from the state’s university leaders drove home the urgency of this issue.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. 

This article appears in The College Crisis.