There is a pretty important issue on university funding around the state of Michigan. In 2024, the University of Michigan got an estimated amount of $801 million dollars of the research funding by the National Institute of Health and reducing the cost rate to 15% and it would cost the University of Michigan about $181 million a year and at MSU they conducted $136 million with the NIH and the change will cost the school $27 million. This is important because people around the state are having issues trying to pay for school.
“Obviously, the more funds a university has, the more they’ll be able to provide quality professors, smaller class sizes, and maybe amenities like updated dorm rooms and facilities like, you know, places to work out and other activities,” CHS counselor Daniela Bickel
Michigan high school seniors around the state are worried about Michigan’s university funding issue because they are scared to have to pay more, and some are not worried about the funding issue at all because of the school size
“Probably negatively, because that means I gotta pay more,” senior Ivan Becker said.
Most schools around the state differ in school population, so they have to pay different amounts, and some of the past students of that school pay for the new students that are going to this school to get even better opportunities at the school.
“I know that universities are funded in several ways. They receive some money from the federal government. There’s some money from the state, and then, typically, depending on the university, there will be money from people who graduated from the university who donate to the university in order to help new students attend there, and so they’ll fund scholarships and things like that,” Bickel said.
There are a lot of good scholarship opportunities that the state has to offer for incoming college students, and gives them money if they get a specific scholarship, like the Michigan Achievement Scholarship
“There is the Michigan Achievement Scholarship. Only seven out of 10 Michigan seniors qualify, and you get $5,500 per year, and you can have it for up to five years. So it can be a total of $27,500 for a university in Michigan,” Bickel said.
There are a lot of other different conflicts with how universities are losing their funding, and one of those is families’ loss in the high birth.
“I can tell you that even before anything recent, one thing that has been happening all over in America is that there has been a decline in birth rates. And so even before anything changed with any political things, colleges were expecting that there would be what they called an enrollment cliff, meaning that there are less students enrolling because there would be fewer births,” Bickel said.
