This 31st annual report summarizes the instructional outputs, instructional faculty salary costs, tuition, and Commonwealth instructional appropriations and student aid for Pennsylvania's State-related and State-owned universities--the Commonwealth's public universities.

The report is based primarily on data reported by Pennsylvania's public universities to the Pennsylvania General Assembly, as required by the annual appropriation acts for the State-related universities, and the Public School Code for the State-owned universities. These data include student credit hours and degrees, and faculty salaries and workweek activities. The report includes instructional faculty salaries, but does not include noninstructional faculty salaries. Therefore, average faculty salaries in the report cannot be compared to those reported in other places. In addition, since the university data do not include nonsalary expenditures, the report does not summarize total instructional costs for the universities. Data on tuition, Commonwealth instructional appropriations, and student aid from other sources supplement the university data.

Levels of data for 2002-03 and data trends for 1997-98 to 2002-03 are presented. Readers are cautioned to use the current historical tables for prior years' data, as some previous data have been revised in these tables.

Student credit-hour and salary data are combined for the computation of a measure of cost efficiency: instructional faculty salary cost per full-time equivalent student. Tuition and instructional appropriation data are combined for the computation of a measure of cost sharing: the percentage of total instructional revenues covered by instructional appropriations.

This report is intended for use by a variety of persons or groups: by legislators for making appropriation decisions; by university administrators for evaluating policies related to faculty outputs, salaries and workloads; and by Pennsylvania citizens, for making informed judgments about the levels and shares of costs related to public higher education in the Commonwealth.