It depends on how you look at it. There has been a decrease in funding per student.

But it is presented as a state government action to cut funds, when the actual events were that action was to increase funds but not enough to catch up with increasing student numbers. Given that student numbers are not under control of the state government, describing it as a state action to cut funds in misleading.

It is misleading in the same way as to say that the company substantially raised the average salary of employees when in fact what happened is that CEO salary was doubled. Technically yes, that means average salary has increased too. But such statement omits important details that make it misleading.

Oh, see what you're saying now. You're right. It has been "slanted" as a funding "cut".

That said, I think you'd agree that the government has failed to fund the education of its citizens to the level it used to. I got my college education when it was "cheap" so if I was selfish [OK, more selfish than I am] I would be inclined to go with the "I got mine, tough for you. I had to walk uphill both ways to school, blah, blah. Thanks for paying for my retirement."

why doesn't tax revenue rise at the same pace as student population?

50 years ago 10% of kids went to college.

Now it's 50%.

That is just a change in participant behavior. No reason tax revenue would go up 5x without some big hikes.

We aren't just taking a 5% increase because people had more kids (which as you said, should be dealt with by natural tax increases)

Let's consider the distributional effects of giving college aid to 10% of the population vs. 50%. If the 10% were people who would not have otherwise gone to college, it looks like a good move to create income mobility and increase economic growth which will ultimately create more even tax revenue. If the 10% would have gone to college anyway and taken loans (and easily paid them back with their top 10% earnings), the aid starts to looks regressive instead. But when we are talking about 50% of the population, things seem different.

So is college a basic right of society?

I think it makes people as a whole make better choices. If we could get 100% of people to go to college (or even 90% or 70%), I don't think we would be worse off as a nation... but obviously it needs to be free or near free, not burdening everyone with 10 billion dollars in debt.

It seems like the high spending per student is a bigger issue than who is paying. If 100% of people go to college, a massive amount of money will be spent on college at current US rates (20 million people aged 20-23 * $20,000/year = $400 billion/year as an estimate). I'm not against income redistribution at all, I'm a big fan of it. I don't mind if the government takes half my Bay Area engineer salary. It would just make rents lower and I will end up with the same quality of life. However, I care about the ROI of that redistribution. If the government takes $100,000 from me I would much rather it pay for college for ten people than five people. But if college only cost $10,000/year total [0], the debt incurred by the student's contributions would be more manageable. And the $100,000 could go toward building a subway or something.

[0] the US spends twice as much per student on average (including all sources of funding, government and tuition). http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp