>As
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/education_spending points out, from the 1950s to the present, the share of GDP spent by government on universities went from 0.4% to 1.7%.
A four-fold increase in funding as a percentage of GDP isn't relevant to the more important metric, real funding per student.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/state-budget-and-tax/state-hig...
> But the long-term trend is that spending by states has gone up relative to both enrollment and inflation.
Real funding per university student has not increased, and this claim is not backed by your source. See my source above for rebuttal.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2012/09/23/texas-colle...
"State officials used to brag about the affordability of college, but the costs have ballooned since 2003, even when inflation is factored in.
Less money from state
That year, to help close a budget cap without raising taxes, lawmakers cut the amount of taxpayer money the state sent to universities — an overall 11 percent decrease per student — but removed ceilings placed on tuition so campuses could make up for the lost revenue."
> But tuition has outpaced inflation in good years as well. Which suggests that the long-term trend has other causes.
Yes, that state funding doesn't return to prior levels (See my first source)
> Salaries for the people teaching vary from $40k for a postdoc to an average of $95k for a full professor. Which means that in an average classroom, a handful of students could hire the teacher as a private tutor, give the teacher a pay raise, and themselves save money! This basic fact suggests that it should be possible to teach students for a lot less than we consider normal today.
A university is more than its teaching staff. There's research, buildings to maintain, academic support staff and programs, and plenty of other things as well.
> But attempts to quantify all the different factors, such as https://www.nber.org/papers/w21967, find that the biggest single factor is the combination of restricted supply and artificially increased demand (thanks to the availability of loans and financial aid).
One source which happens to ignore many of the factors I mentioned above does not prove your point true. Most importantly, tuition ceilings imposed on universities by state governments. Luckily the paper discusses its shortcomings:
"Given that our model effectively lumps private and public colleges together, it appears that changes in state funding support and changes in other sources of non-tuition revenue largely offset each other. In future work, we plan to disaggregate the model along the public/private dimension."
The source groups private and public colleges together. Private colleges do not receive state funding and therefore would not have to hike tuition in response to lower stand funding. This noise averages out the effect that state funding cuts have on public school tuition rates.