A new report released Thursday ranked Nevada second nationally among states that increased higher education funding from 2023 to 2024 — even as institutions statewide have cut their budgets.
The numbers come from the annual Grapevine Report, which tracks public higher education funding by state without adjusting for inflation, state size or the number of students.
After remaining roughly stagnant from 2019 through 2022, Nevada’s higher education funding will jump 27.3 percent between 2023 and 2024. That increase comes largely from a pot of state money designed to fund historically large cost of living adjustments (COLAs) for state workers, which helped push state higher education funding from $746 million to nearly $950 million.
However, the state only partially funded those raises. Institutions have argued that paying for the remainder has forced additional budget cuts, and led to the largest student fee increase in a decade late last year.
