According to recent reports, higher education in the United States is becoming less affordable across the board; still some states, such as California, are showing up others, such as Texas.

Texas and 43 other states received an F in affordability, according to Measuring Up 2006, a September report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education. California and Utah, which both earned a C-, scored the highest grade.

Texas did beat California in one respect. In 2005, Texas graduates departed their institutions of learning — diploma in hand — with bigger student debt loads, according to an August report by the Project on Student Debt.

Though tuition rates are higher in California, the state has lower student debt rates than Texas. The average student debt for 2005 graduates from public universities in Texas is $16,400, nearly $4,000 more than California at $12,542, according to the student debt report.

According to the report, better availability of financial aid offsets higher tuition rates.

California is out-performing Texas because of complex sociological issues related to financial aid, said Larry Burt, associate vice president of Student Financial Services at UT.

“The most significant of these is the size of the California state grant as opposed to the Texas state grant,” Burt said. “The Cal Grant program is several times larger than the Texas grant program.”

California has seen an 141 percent increase in state financial aid since 1994 and a 19 percent increase from 2002 to 2004, according to a March report by the Ed Fund and the California Student Aid Commission.

The growth stems from legislation in 2000 establishing the Cal Grant program as a guarantee for California high school graduates who meet specific income and grade criteria, according to the California report.

In 2002-03, Texas ranked last in its distribution of grant aid among the nation’s six largest states, according to an April report measuring state aid by the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation, a public nonprofit corporation. California ranked second after New York, according to the report.

“State fiscal miserliness has got us into this educational funding fix, and it would have been somewhat justifiable if it led to an end result of true affordability of higher education for all qualified young people in this state,” wrote Thomas Palaima, a classics professor at the University of Texas who also studies education policy. “But this has not happened.”

“UT is a tremendous bargain for the many students who come from backgrounds with family incomes of $100,000 or more,” Palaima said. Meanwhile he said, it is still expensive to those who come from incomes of under $40,000.

The 40 percent of the Texas population with the lowest income earns an average $18,000 per year. After financial aid, these residents are paying a net college cost of $8,186 a year, nearly 45 percent of their total income, according to the report by the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

Raising tuition and setting aside a proper percentage of revenues for needy students would allow those who can afford to pay to subsidize those who cannot, Palaima said.

“But legislators have not been willing to support this because it looks as if everyone is paying more,” he said. “They say that increasing tuition puts education out of reach for the poorer members of society. In fact, it would not. But it would make their richer and more influential constituents pay more. And that is not politically expedient.”

After the federal government, institutions are the second largest provider of student aid for both states, according to reports by the Ed Fund and California Student Aid Commission and the Texas Guaranteed Student Loan Corporation.

California provided $2.1 billion in institutional aid, both public and private, in 2003-04, a 20 percent increase from the previous year, according to the California report. This total constitutes 24 percent of student aid in California.

Texas does not have the total estimates for institutional aid. However in 2003-04 $107 million was distributed among public institutions through their own resources, such as tuition and fees, the Texas report said. In 2002-03, $332 million was distributed among private institutions.

The University of California System returns 33 percent of tuition and fees to financial aid, said Shawn Brick, the financial aid coordinator for the UC System.

UT Austin returns 28 percent, according to Student Financial Services.

“The University of California System was able enroll a very large percentage of low-income students, the result of both institutional student aid programs, and strong long-term support by the state through the Cal Grant program,” Brick said.

In 2004, Texas’s population and gross state product were estimated at slightly more than half that of California, yet state grant aid in Texas estimated at only one-third that of California, according to statistics from The National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

California earns much of its state resources from personal and corporate income tax, which Texas does not collect.

In 2005, California’s state resources amounted to nearly $90 billion, while Texas’s state resources amounted to nearly $35 billion, according to the fiscal survey.

“Financial aid funding has to compete with other important issues the state supports, such as long-term health care and the prison system,” said Rochelle Gehrke, an educational administration graduate student and volunteer coordinator of the Higher Education Administration Student Prof. Association.

The largest source of grant aid in Texas and California is federal money. The Pell Grant, a federal need-based grant for undergraduates, constitutes the majority of total grant aid according to both state reports.

The value of the Pell Grant has declined over the past three decades, according to the Texas report. The Pell Grant covers nearly 16 percent of Texas attendance costs and slightly more in the United States as a whole.

“It’s also unfortunate that sometimes the community at large does not see funding higher education as their responsibility, and people don’t understand that if we don’t have an educated populous then, as a whole, as a country, we will start to lose and fall behind in some fields; arguably we are behind,” Gehrke said.