Quote Originally Posted by VictorCharlie View Post
Come on Kirk. You would never allow Lyle or myself to make a statement like that w/o supporting facts. So please show me a supporting document that describes the amount of federal money that a state was using specifically for their Universities/Colleges general funds and the amount it has decreased by since 1980.
The fact is that since Reagan there have been massive cuts of federal funding to states and one of the ways that states have made up the funding gap is by charging higher and higher tuition fees :

Once elected, Mr. Reagan set the educational tone for his administration by:
a. calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students,
b. annually demanding 20% across-the-board cuts in higher education funding,[2]
c. repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses
d. engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the popular President of the University of California, and
e. declaring that the state "should not subsidize intellectual curiosity,[3]"



http://www.newfoundations.com/Clabaugh/CuttingEdge/Reagan.html


So how about that. It turns out it's a conservative aim to end free tuition to state universities as part of the conservative war on education (Reagan having run on a platform of abolishing the Department of Education in 1980) and when they finally do succeed in passing the cost of tuition from the state to students they then turn round and say it's government subsidies that are causing the problem.





Also, too, a more detailed look at the whole thing :


http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/from-master-plan-to-no-plan-the-slow-death-of-public-higher-education