State Funding Cuts Matter - Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed

For every $1,000 cut from per-student state and local appropriations, the average student can be expected to pay $257 more per year in tuition and fees -- and the rate is rising. It’s a deceptively simple question. And it’s caused two different camps to dig in, look at similar data and yell past each other with very different answers. On one side, typically inhabited by left-wing thinkers, is the camp that believes tuition has gone up over time because colleges have been starved by state and local funding cuts to higher education. On the other side, right-wing analysts often argue that the long-term decline in state funding -- so-called state disinvestment -- has little to no effect on tuition. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/07/24/new-study-attempts-show-how-much-state-funding-cuts-push-tuition