Are Connecticut Public Colleges Affordable?
The debate over whether colleges and universities are affordable is not unique to Connecticut. In fact, the higher education community at large is witnessing as never before challenges to the fundamental underpinnings of many states low-cost tuition policies. This debate is not an easy one to conclude. The first major obstacle in discussions is gaining some consensus on what affordability means and what measures or benchmarks would be used to assess and monitor process. While there has been progress in this arena, there is no one accepted or steadfast answer to this issue. This section of the report will examine several ways one might begin to assess affordability. It will compare tuition and fee rates to national and regional peers and to changes in per capita income and personal disposable income. A discussion on how the level of state commitment to higher education, including an examination of the relative student versus state share of educational costs, has changed over the last fe
