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18 BizEd JULY | AUGUST 2015 research+insights Funding Forecast A NEW STUDY PREDICTS that individual states in the U.S. will have diŸ- culty securing more state funding if the growth of the labor market continues to slow and the costs of Medicaid continue to rise. "Crowded Out: The Outlook for State Higher Education Spending," was released by the National Commission on Financing 21st Century Higher Education, which is directed by Ray Scheppach, an economic fellow at the Miller Center at the Univer- sity of Virginia in Charlottesville. The commission contracted with Moody's Analytics to project state- by-state spending from 2014 to 2024. The study notes that over the past several decades, the growth in state funding for discretionary spending categories has been squeezed at an alarming rate. Mandatory spending programs are requiring more and more state funds, leaving few- er dollars for other programs. Medicaid spending, for example, was less than 10 percent of state-sourced spending 30 years ago, but today accounts for nearly 16 percent. Taking all funding sources into account, Medicaid has grown to more than a quarter of total state spending. At the same time, higher education has fallen from around 14 percent of state-sourced spending in the late 1980s to just under 13 percent today. "Our baseline forecasts show that trend continuing throughout the next decade and beyond," the report notes. Over the next year, the Nation- al Commission on Financing 21st Century Higher Education will develop and propose new funding models that will expand access to post-secondary education. The work will identify new public investment and partnership strategies that can generate greater private investments; it also will suggest ways to realign current incentives to reduce costs and enhance graduation rates. The results of the "Crowded Out" study can be found at web1.millercenter.org/commissions/higher-ed/ 2015-higherEdFunding-Moodys.pdf. TEACHING KIDS ABOUT FOOD How can parents get children to eat more vegetables? Make them more aware of—and involved in—how veg- etables are grown, say researchers at Audencia Nantes in France. Last year, they concluded EducAlim, a three-year study conducted by Audencia's Center for Research and Food Product Market- ing and financed by the French govern- ment. The goal: Find ways to encourage kids to eat healthier foods. In the experiment, 584 middle school students at 17 schools across western France were followed for three years. Among them, 250 students at eight pilot schools participated in gar- dening activities, cooking workshops, and farm visits. Teachers also exposed this group of students to the nutrition- al, economic, cultural, and ecological aspects of growing and distributing vegetables. Then, researchers focused their attention on two vegetables particu- larly unpopular among children: Brussels sprouts and endive. They found that children at the pilot schools ate twice the amount of those vegetables—which they had grown in their gardens—as the children at the other nine schools. Teachers also used teaching mod- ules developed by the research team and educational authorities, which incorporated food issues into math, French, and biology lessons. The lessons were so successful, teachers have continued to use them even after the project ended in June 2014.