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All of that spending took a downward turn somewhere in the 80s & 90s. As a consequence students must bear the vast majority of the cost of their university education starting somewhere in the 00s.

As a percentage of the total, yes, but I wrote this in another comment a few days ago:

Why Does College Cost So Much? is the most comprehensive treatment of the issue I've seen, and it argues that the main driver of college costs is Baumol's Cost Disease.

Universities like the University of Washington are also in a spending arms race: universities are increasing their per-student spending, even in the face of falling state spending: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/04/public_univer...

Universities are in something of a prestige arms race, and that arms race is in part being enabled by subsidized loans that can't be discharged in bankruptcy. It's not clear that greater support from states would change this basic dynamic.

I paid $800-$900 per quarter when I was attending UW. Go dawgs. I have no idea how I would do it today, I wasn't rich back then.

That may be true at some universities, but certainly not all.

I'm most familiar with the University of California, where the state's willingness to fund it has massively decreased, not only as a percentage subsidy but in terms of actual contribution. In 1975, the state contributed $29k towards each UC student; in 1985 it was $31k; in 1995 it was $23k; in 2005 it was $20k; and today it's a mere $13k (all figures in 2012 dollars). That's a decrease of about 55% in per-student funding: http://www.kmjn.org/misc/uc_funding.txt

Overall cost of the UC system, on the other hand, has actually slightly decreased on a per-student basis, but not nearly enough to cover that 55% funding cut. Therefore, tuition has gone up to cover it.

If you want to factor out the confounding factor that a larger percentage of students go to college, you can also look at it on the macro-level and ask, what percentage of the state's resources do Californians choose to devote to funding higher education? That gives an indication of higher education as a public priority. And there it's again a drop of a little over half: in 1975 the UC system's funding equalled 0.3% of state GDP; today it equals 0.12% of state GDP. If funding were put back to 0.3% of state GDP (or even 0.25% or so), tuition could be cut almost to zero, so there is no real cost problem, just a no-longer-willing-to-fund problem.

Could part of the problem actually be the widespread use of financial aid and student loans? If there was no assistance and everyone had to pay out of pocket, only the very top universities could charge $30,000+ a semester since almost nobody could afford to go at that price. It's kind of like healthcare costs; most people are insured so the hospital can charge 8 dollars for a single aspirin and almost nobody complains.

Sounds like an argument for single-payer public education, which is mostly what we had back up through the 70s.

> ..but the real problem is that American politics has abdicated its responsibility to educate its people.

Er, being a bit hyperbolic there aren't we?

It's a double-sided resource crunch. Funding is drying up, yes, but meanwhile costs as academic institutions are ballooning. Administrative costs have rocketed, while other changes such as increasingly generous tenure arrangements sap away resources from the cutting edge of education. It's not unusual for Tenured professors to get a sabbatical every three years, rather than the more traditions one in seven. In 2011, 20 of Harvard's 48 History professors were on sabbatical.

Where do you see the policy that professors take a sabbatical every three years? I've looked at the Harvard faculty web pages for several of their departments and they all say a most once every seven years after tenure.

Yes, the standard is one paid sabbatical every 7 years. And in some fields it comes with the de-facto obligation to write a book during that year. It is also the case that at any given time many of Harvard's faculty (in particular) are on sabbatical, but most of those are unpaid sabbaticals. Ivy League profs often take time off to be visiting scholars at other institutions, or at the UN or IMF and such. But they don't normally get paid for that; they take an unpaid sabbatical and are paid by the institution they visit, or by a research grant.

But in any case how much Ivy Leagues cost is hardly the main question of public interest; they could cost $80k for all I care. It's the decreasing affordability of systems like the University of California that is the major problem from a public-education standpoint, and that is mainly due to decreased funding.

"As a consequence students must bear the vast majority of the cost of their university education starting somewhere in the 00s."

Then by supply and demand, prices would have imploded since 2000. Either that or most schools went our of business. Right?

Nope, because of the deadly trifecta of easy loans available to literally anyone, young students with no life experience to understand the impact of debt, and parents who unwaveringly believe that a college education is the most important stepping stone to future success.