Jeff Greenberg/Contributor/Getty Images With the help of nearly $2 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funding, state funding allocations for higher education during the 2021 fiscal year remained roughly the same as last fiscal year, according to the latest Grapevine higher education funding report. Total state support for higher education edged up by 0.3 percent to $96.7 billion in the 2021 fiscal year, which began July 1, 2020, and will end on June 30, 2021. Without federal dollars, direct state funding levels would have declined by 1.3 percent this fiscal year. “The results suggest that budgets have not been wrecked to the extent we feared they might be by the pandemic,” said Jim Applegate, visiting professor at Illinois State University's Center for the Study of Education Policy and editor of the Grapevine report. “Part of the reason for that is the federal government did step up.”