[pacifist]

It didn't make sense to me until I read this:

from the article:

"Some of this increased spending in education has been driven by a sharp rise in the percentage of Americans who go to college."

from the comments:

"The money PER STUDENT was slashed. That is what matters for the cost to each student."… "This is an elaborate lie, to justify what is indefensible without the help of such lies."

[ta82828]

Well the article disagrees with that claim, "Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today." so I guess it would be time to go to the references/data if we had them.

[pacifist]

Here you go. Data from the internet:

[1]"States are all over the map on their retreat from higher education. At one extreme are the two states that have managed to maintain their fiscal 1980 investment through 2011: Wyoming (+2.3 percent) and North Dakota (+0.8 percent).

But these are the exceptions. All other states have reduced their support by anywhere from 14.8 percent to 69.4 percent between fiscal 1980 and fiscal 2011."

This covers roughly the same time period as in the article. Only there is something different going on: state appropriations for higher education is going down.

[1] http://www.acenet.edu/the-presidency/columns-and-features/Pa...

[pdkl95]

This article seems to have gone out of its way to list a lot of aggregate numbers that increased while comparing it to per-student tuition.

Also, there could be more factors than just the increased percentage of people who go to college. The tuition increase could also include increased administrative costs or spending on extracurricular activities such sports. I know that when I was attending UC Davis, we saw an increase to pay for the new computer labs that were being installed.

[jsprogrammer]

The article mentioned the large increase in administrators.

[Retric]

Yes, but how large is that increase per student.

In 2011 21.0 million people where going to an undergraduate degree, in 1970 that was just 7.3 million. So from 1970 to now ~2.7 times as many people are getting an undergraduate degree. They are using some nebuslus 1960's number and inflation increased 7.93x from 1960 to now. 7.93 x ~3 = 23.79 x increase would have kept up per student.

Or roughly the government is spending less than 1/2 as much per student after adjusting for inflation. http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1&year1=1960&ye...

[muzz]

Yes this amorphous group of "administrators". Wonder why no article ever mentions the actual job titles/functions of these administrators? I suspect they are largely athletics-related, and by not providing details the authors can rely on readers to assume that these "administrators" are instead useless bureaucrats.

[jsprogrammer]

Are you arguing that tuition costs for everyone should rise so that there can be more athletics-related personnel?

[minikites]

I'm always suspicious when I read articles like this that claim to tell the "real story" when "everyone else" is lying, so I looked up the author:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Campos

> Campos is perhaps best known for his 2004 book The Obesity Myth (later published as The Diet Myth) which reviews medical research on the association between higher body mass and health. Campos's contentions that obesity is healthy were praised by some sociologists and critical theorists, and overwhelmingly criticized by medical, epidemiological, and statistical researchers with professional training in empirical research.

So he's a professional at this kind of manipulation.