I was reading mitumba's great diary about proposed changes to Florida's higher education system and it occurred to me to check out some numbers for my state.
The University of Colorado (CU) in Boulder is generally seen as Colorado's flagship school and makes a reasonable proxy for the financial situation at other 4 year institutions. The cost for students over the past decade have most certainly risen. At the low end, tuition and fees work out to be about $12,000 a year for a full-time undergraduate. In the 1999-2000 year, tuition and fees worked out to be about $4000 a year.
Stone the crows! Students are paying more than triple what they paid at the turn of the millennium. This fits nicely with the story about rampant inflation in higher education since students nationwide are going ever more deeply in debt to finance ever more expensive degrees.
The tricky part is that over that period of time there have been recurring state budget shortfalls and fairly constant cuts to higher education while federal financial aid has remained stagnant in terms of non-loan assistance. At one time, Colorado subsidized tuition for in-state students. They switched to a voucher system that from a student perspective was a semantic change-- rather than money going to the school directly, students theoretically were granted the funds at the time of enrollment that were then applied to the bill, for y'know freedom! competition! or some such. What it actually did was change the methodology of subsidizing tuition based on a percentage of total cost and became a flat per credit hour rate. Then the cuts happened.
The dirty secret about the high cost of a university education in Colorado is that university budgets have stayed nearly flat while federal and state funding has dropped dramatically. CU's 2011 total revenue is $1,220,300,000 and in 1999 it was 1,218,131,700. That's significantly below the increase in inflation over that time. State funding dropped by 11% from an already low 16% of the university budget. Students used to contribute 21% of the university's revenue through tuition and fees. They now account for 43%. (numbers taken from CU budget facts 2011-2012 PDF and CU Boulder economic impact, FY 1999)
Conservatives blame the inflation on increased reliance on financial aid and in mitumba's account of Florida's proposal their idea is to actually eliminate government support for universities. From Colorado's experience, I would say that further cutting government support would be counterproductive. At the very least, a state that funds its public schools sufficiently can exert some amount of control over tuition through the power of the purse. Once that leverage is gone, public schools can abandon the mission of service to the public with no meaningful accountability.