It's not entirely due to the increase in student population, either, although that's part of it. If you look at just the total funding column, it's gone down since the '80s, despite the state's increasing population and GDP. Someone should double-check my numbers, but last time I looked into this I remember a back-of-the-envelope calculation that California used to put ~0.3% of state GDP into the UC system, and now puts in only about 0.1%.
The demand comes from the 'social marker' heuristic that a university degree conveys (ie, social proof) for employment and personal networking. Until there is a competing "commodity" whith this aspect of social utility, a degree with have economic value proportional to GDP, in a way like housing stock. The main problem with broad based inflation of the costs of college is that there is only so much "beach front" real estate in the degree system. The top 10 schools are typically the ones that matter, for social signalling, and quite frankly nobody cares how much you paid to get the degree. A "free" degree from cambridge (UK) has a good value, just like a $$$ degree from MIT or Stanford. Heck, many will argue a <dropout> from a top 5 school has more going for them than a degree holder from a middle of the pack school.
The great thing about Berkeley is its one of the few state schools that has a powerful global reputation. And in that sense it remains good value for money (if you are a resident Californian). But the taxpayers and politicians seem to be playing a rather sophisticated game of stealth-taxation with the Higher Education system as a whole. It really doesn't matter the details until one unpacks how the system is really working. And what is driving supply and demand at a more 'meta' level.
Not to mention, barely anyone pays the "listed price" in the USA for any school.
What an amusing and inaccurate stereotype. Brits who repeat it have apparently never been to the further reaches of England. For example, Birmingham or Liverpool... See how stereotyping isn't helpful?
[1] There is a long history of "fleecing" rich foreign kids at schools, where they are looked at as cash cows. This is both true in the US (where they pay 'retail' with no financial aid) and in places like the UK/EU where locals are heavily subsidized.
My point is simply that maybe college costs so much more now because it's just worth it. It used to be that you could still do alright without a college degree, but a ton of manufacturing jobs have moved overseas and there's a ton of downward pressure on peoples' wages who don't have engineering and computer jobs.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that this is the reason why college is so expensive these days, but I think that it's a point which isn't brought up enough.
I think there's a tendency to say: "oh well not everyone can have these high-paying jobs", "college isn't right for everyone", etc. which Rowe also says. Maybe that's true, but we certainly seem to have a shortage of qualified people in this country. Seems to me to be a failure of the educational system and while it makes sense not to saddle yourself with tons of debt for a degree if that degree won't help you pay off the debt, I don't think encouraging people not to get a higher education is a good idea either. Now I'm just rambling - I just wanted to point out that that attitude is a sign that something is wrong.
Some of the issue is that people are chasing the economic signals from an age past where the conditions were just different.
According to this http://www.higheredinfo.org/dbrowser/index.php?submeasure=68... total inflation-adjusted revenue per student went from $5,846 in 1991 to $11,016 in 2011.
Here is the page with links to the 2012 report and data: http://www.sheeo.org/node/631
[1] http://www.sheeo.org/sites/default/files/publications/All%20...
I'm not sure the SHEEO number's usable "raw", as it uses its own ad-hoc inflation calculation (HECA) instead of CPI or GDP, but even correcting for that I can't reproduce the numbers in the NCHEMS site from its supposed source.
Now add in the facilities expenses (roof, walls, lights, hvac), and some labs need labs, how much should that cost? I still can't see that being more than another 2K, but I haven't run the numbers on that yet. Overall, it makes 20K a year seem outrageous.
I'm a nearly-finished Ph.D. candidate, and when people complain to me about how bloated and inefficient the government is, I think to myself "Wow, that sounds like a pretty good system."
A typical graduate teaching assistant at my university has about 10 lab sections per academic year. The lab fees--just the lab fees, not tuition--from just one section is enough to pay the TA's salary for the entire year. Even if you include the outrageously-inflated graduate tuition that a TA-ship pays, lab fees from just three lab sections cover the entire compensation package.
The tuition from just one big lecture section is enough to pay a tenured professor's salary for almost two entire years (and a tenured professor should be teaching 5-6 courses per year).
Some of the rest of the money goes to pay for the country-club campus, but most of it disappears into the black hole of bureaucracy.
And we haven't even started to talk about the scam of "overhead" that the university charges on federal research grants--30% straight off the top, except for very large purchases. Want to have a new electrical outlet installed in the lab? You have to use the university's maintenance department (and its inflated hourly rates--at least 3x what you'd pay a licensed/bonded union electrician) and pay overhead on top of that!
Of course, you get a somewhat worse education there, due to the fact that the people teaching are essentially similar to grade school teachers in motivation.
Additionally, another important thing to consider is that the degrees that are actually useful have to compete for professionals with industry to some extent if they want to not be left with the dregs. A professor is going to pull $150,000 a year or more in many places, because that is what they could earn elsewhere.
And yeah, then there is the administration, IT, upkeep, dorm housing, campus police, facilities, student medical coverage, and so on.
But if you really want to know... any public university will have public records. Go check. I know that my local university has only slightly increased student tuition rates, and had a massive influx of students seeking lower prices. The problem is that once the slight surge of money is distributed, they are still on the brink of fiscal collapse due to how much the state has cut funding (they lose money for every in-state student, and have to accept them anyways) and are leaking their top researchers left and right due to the incredibly low wages they pay, relatively speaking.
But seriously, go look for yourself.
Well that's also ignoring the point that colleges used to get the majority of their funding from States, and almost every major University now has the majority(and sometimes a >90% majority) of its funding coming from other sources. College used to be subsidized by society, and now it just isn't subsidized, and in his argument that entire position is ignored.
Like most subjects this is a much more complex problem than either side lets on, but just because Mike Rowe is eloquent in his response doesn't mean that it isn't ignoring rather large portions of the facts.