"Trends in College Spending, 1999-2009: Where does the money come from? Where does it go? What does it buy?" is the fourth in a series of reports on college and university spending from the Delta Cost Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. The mission of the Delta Cost Project is to improve public…

Despite clear evidence that college tuitions are rising (the only incontrovertible fact in this conversation), the policy debate about college costs is remarkably poorly informed by data about college spending patterns, revenue availability, and the relation between spending and tuition increases. The last national study of trends in college…

How do colleges and universities spend their money? To most, it's a black box. The public looks at tuitions, states look at appropriations, trustees look at the endowment, and department managers look at their budgets. How colleges actually spend their money is barely understood by the general public and even many policy makers. In the current…

The work described in this report is part of the national Making Opportunity Affordable (MOA) initiative, and focuses on the presentation of aggregate measures of sector-level trends in revenues and expenditures. This work will be repeated on an annual basis to promote regular use of aggregate measures of spending as part of postsecondary…