The Missouri Department of Higher Education and Workforce Development has until Dec. 1 to craft a new formula for distributing state aid among public colleges and universities — or risk lawmakers creating their own plan that “institutions quite likely will not like,” the state’s higher education commissioner said Wednesday.
Bennett Boggs, speaking during a meeting of the Coordinating Board for Higher Education, urged college presidents to work with the department in “good faith” as it tries to balance competing interests.
“I hope… that we can find a way to reach a consensus that we can present to the legislature, something that we can all agree on. We may not all love it, but it’s something that the legislature will understand,” he said. “Otherwise, I do believe we have some serious risks in front of us, and I don’t take that lightly.”
The deadline for the department to “develop and submit an objective, formula-driven” model that keeps funding flat was included in the state budget lawmakers passed in May. Gov. Mike Kehoe has until the end of June to approve or veto budget bills.
Lawmakers’ order to keep the amount of state aid at just over $1.1 billion is the central challenge, said Leroy Wade, the department’s deputy commissioner of operations.
“That changes the approach of this entirely from what we would have expected otherwise,” he said.
Currently, the department uses a decades-old funding model that starts with the prior year’s appropriation and adds an inflationary factor. This lump sum is then divided between the universities, with each receiving a set percentage.
Higher education officials have been working to overhaul this system for years. But any changes face opposition because a new formula could reduce state aid for some universities while increasing it for others.
In 2022, lawmakers directed the department to study funding formulas with incentives for high-performing universities. The result was a 92-page report by the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.
The study suggested that the state move to a “cost-based approach in which the formula yields an estimated total amount of funding required to serve each institution’s instructional mission,” with additional funding for high-performing schools.
A cost-based formula would not assume a particular funding level, conflicting with state lawmakers’ request to keep funding flat. But other recommendations in the report, like prioritizing funding for fixed costs, are part of the department’s ideas.
“I don’t think we have to start from scratch,” Wade said. He envisions a formula that meets universities’ basic needs while incentivizing performance.
Boggs said lawmakers have told him to keep the formula easy to understand, so he wants to constrain it to “a few limited metrics.”
Brian Hammons, a board member from Stockton, said legislators told him “simplification is going to be important.”
The department plans to build in guardrails to slowly transition universities to the new formula, Boggs said.
“We all saw in the last legislative session some wild swings,” he said. “And we certainly do not want that to happen in this environment.”
In March, the Missouri House passed a higher education budget that would have based state aid solely on enrollment. The proposal, which was rejected by the state Senate, would have cut funding for Truman State University in Kirksville in half and made massive reductions to the state’s historically Black universities.
The budget that ultimately passed this year is a repeat of Fiscal Year 2026’s funding for colleges, though the governor has not yet taken action on it.
The pressure to create a new formula comes as state officials are warning that Missouri’s broader budget picture is worsening.
Wednesday morning, while the coordinating board was meeting, Missouri State Auditor Scott Fitzpatrick released a report that warned against the state’s deficit spending and signaled deep cuts in the near future.
“If the upcoming budgetary years are going to be as difficult as we think,” Boggs said. “It is going to take productive relationships, and goodwill is our only way to come together and come through this as an intact set of institutions.”
Any plan reallocating state aid at the current funding level will produce increases for some colleges while others see cuts. But Boggs warned university presidents not to become jealous, telling a Russian parable about a peasant who envies a neighbor with a cow and asks a genie to slaughter it.
“Killing the neighbor’s cow does not mean a cow magically appears on your campus,” Boggs said. “It means the legislature gets to take that cow back to the barn and redirect it, however they decide.”
