ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for
college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the
course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was
slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year,
which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational
debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.
This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to
explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has
nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst
sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.
The conventional wisdom was reflected in a recent National Public Radio
series on the cost of college. “So it’s not that colleges are spending more money
to educate students,” Sandy Baum of the Urban Institute told NPR. “It’s that
they have to get that money from someplace to replace their lost state funding
— and that’s from tuition and fees from students and families.”
In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger
today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden
age of public funding in the 1960s. Such spending has increased at a much
faster rate than government spending in general. (continue reading)