States of Crises

Whether you're an oppressive foreign dictatorship or an American state in the process of committing fiscal suicide, you know you're losing the public relations battle when encounters between armor-clad riot police with truncheons and college students are broadcast on TV. That's the sad situation California found itself in last week, after the University of California Board of Regents announced a staggering 32 percent midsemester tuition hike. Students responded by demonstrating, chanting, and occupying administration buildings. Things got unruly, law enforcement was called, and within hours it was every spin doctor's nightmare, replayed endlessly on YouTube and cable news.

As is often the case, California is leading a national trend. Higher education is becoming less affordable across the country every year. If states and universities don't make major structural changes in the way they operate, anger and frustration could start to boil over nationwide.

The UC tuition crisis is a symptom of the larger collapse of governance in the Golden State. It takes two thirds of both houses in the state General Assembly to raise taxes, while new spending programs can be created by public referendum. Tax dollars are too hard to raise and too easy to spend, leaving the state lurching from one budget crisis to the next. The young men and women rushing to the barricades on UC campuses are Ronald Reagan's children, victims of a failed antigovernment movement that managed to turn people against taxes while leaving their appetite for public services unchecked.

The pattern has been repeated in state after state over the past 30 years, even in places that raise and spend money in a normal way. Every time a recession hits, tax-frightened state legislators raise revenue by cutting university budgets disproportionately and allowing tuition to make up the difference, a back-door levy that hits poor and middle-class students the hardest. New York State, for example, is following California's lead with severe cuts to its public universities.

A recent report from the College Board shows the result: In the 1980s, tuition at public universities increased by 3 percent above inflation, on average, every year. In the 1990s, the after-inflation increase jumped to 4 percent. By the 2000s, it was nearly 5 percent. The price of college is growing faster than family income, GDP, and even the health-care costs that are threatening to break the public treasury. And those numbers were compiled before the huge price hikes in California and elsewhere. ...

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