Serious point: let's say that, to you personally, investing in the stock market and going to college are a wash. They're not a wash for the state. The state gets more taxes from your higher-paying job. The chances are you're also helping to support some lower-paying jobs as part of your industry. So it's not unreasonable to expect the state to contribute to actually making this happen.

The benefits are actually much larger than I've just described. There's a snowball effect as the industries of the state move up the ladder. America is currently benefiting from past state investment in education. (There's intangible benefits too, but for these purposes let's just talk about the benefits the state accrues.)

>The state gets more taxes from your higher-paying job.

That's if you accept the higher-education-as-training model. Under the higher-education-as-signaling model, the primary effect of education is to choose how to allocate a fixed set of high paying jobs. If there's 100 slots for new lawyers this year, then the difference between sending 150 and 151 students through law school is an additional unemployed lawyer.

There's a case to be made for that in particular professions, and there's no way the state should be funding the dodgy law colleges that have sprouted all over America. But then, if you subscribe to that model you should also believe that you should be able to disavow education loans in the event of bankruptcy.

The federal government is having it both ways right now: it earns interest on the money it loaned to you to get a higher education, and it also generates higher revenues via your increased lifetime earnings. This is a bummer because its not like your state taxes went down along with a decrease in state funding for your in-state universities.

Basically state governments off-loaded the burden of funding on the students while reaping the benefits of said investments.

Doesn't explain what's happening in private higher education though.

If public higher ed. has its capacity and/or quality cut, wouldn't that increase the demand for private education?

The public universities don't cut capacity or quality - they raise costs. And the private colleges follow suit because they can.

Sure it does, if stake school is X, then private schools need to cost more than X to seem exclusive.

Further, financial aid makes nameplate number less meaningful. If someone has rich parents or wins a full ride then schools want to milk that for as much as possible. Otherwise they can always add discounts down to whatever someone can pay.

Is there a name for the "law" that you can always find "credible" information supporting both sides of any issue?

http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost-...

"Fair and balanced?"

Um, not sure what you are talking about wrt community support? The community, and the state was supporting the university quite liberally.

My observations from attending and then later working at a large southern public university is that a bunch of things happened:

1) The financiers got in bed with the financial aid office, figuratively and possibly literally.

2) The campus went on an inexplicable building boom the likes of which no one had ever seen before. The state funded those projects, but they were clearly handouts to construction companies and pork spending. Sickening, really.

3) The quality of the average student plummeted. I blame the financiers for this, too--asses in seats is a thing.

So while it may be generally good that more people had access to higher education, at the same time the quality dropped, and I seriously doubt the outcomes for many of those people actually improved over attending community college or perhaps no college. Their debt loads had to be tremendous, after all.

There are huge discrepancies in student preparedness in different areas. It's possible your right, the South has long viewed education with suspicion and this has gotten worse, probably insuring students today are less ready for college.

It's also possible that states where education was valued have pulled back funding. There is actual hard data to indicate this is the case, but I'm also trying to avoid dismissing your claims out of hand.

I did undergrad at a state school (University of Illinois at Chicago) and later worked there as a researcher and our pension was bankrupt and the state was just trying to murder what was left of benefits and reasons to want to work there. Hilariously enough colleagues at private schools (SAIC, etc) in design in the area are now all bailing to work at UIC because their benefits and pay are far worse. I am in an evening MBA program at UW Seattle now, Foster School of Business, and its half covered by my employer. Everyone's trying to gut funding but improve education..