The graph in your link below shows why it is disingenuous to argue state support for higher education has not kept up with tuition costs. Your graph shows state support for higher education has exceeded the rate of inflation over the last 30 years (but not by much.) Since tuition increases have exceeded the rate of inflation by a factor of roughly two over the last 30 years, the percent of state support will go down if state support only keeps up with inflation.
My understanding is that salaries for instructors have only kept up with inflation and not exceeded it; so this begs the question: if state support has kept pace with inflation and instructor's salaries have only kept pace with inflation, where is all the extra cash going?
My point in raising this issue is that public universities, in their zeal to keep up with elite private institutions, have abandoned an important public obligation: keeping a higher education accessible to the broad public. The increasing debt slavery imposed on undergraduates is a disgrace. Unfortunately, the loan programs made available by the Federal government have only made it more easy for public institutions to increase tuition faster than inflation. If the purpose of making more Federal loans available to college students was to make it more easy for people to go to college, the effort has had mixed results at best. The flaw was that no controls were placed on the ability of the public universities to raise tuition and fees. For this reason, I agree with Doug that college educations should be free at public institutions; if the Feds pay for it all, the public universities will not be able to raise costs faster than inflation and/or shift tuition dollars away from instruction.
ChuckL
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sean Andrews" <cultstud76 at gmail.com> To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Sent: Monday, March 15, 2010 10:59 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Disappoint With #125
> On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 14:07, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Yeah, but I argued that even the Ann Arbor Chuck wasn't really blaming
>> faculty. I'm pretty sure he was blaming administrations... remember his
>> repeated
>> pointing to the Pres of UofM?
>
> or there's this:
> http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?f=1291
>
> s
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