I don’t think taxes on regular people have dropped, we simply pretend social Security, Medicare, State and local, + fees don’t count as taxes. Which means we can “lower” federal taxes by providing less federal support to state projects.
> Deep state cuts in funding for higher education over the last decade have contributed to rapid, significant tuition increases and pushed more of the costs of college to students, making it harder for them to enroll and graduate. These cuts also have worsened racial and class inequality, since rising tuition can deter low-income students and students of color from college.
> Overall state funding for public two- and four-year colleges in the school year ending in 2018 was more than $6.6 billion below what it was in 2008 just before the Great Recession fully took hold, after adjusting for inflation.[1] In the most difficult years after the recession, colleges responded to significant funding cuts by increasing tuition, reducing faculty, limiting course offerings, and in some cases closing campuses. Funding has rebounded somewhat, but costs remain high and services in some places have not returned.
> Then, during the Reagan Era and the Tax Revolt of the 1980s, states passed tax and expenditure limitations, restrictions that state governments create to limit the amount they can tax or spend.
> “And that meant that state budgets came under threat,” explains Deming. “And so states that used to basically highly subsidize a college education for many people started to cut back in various ways, either by raising tuition or by spending less.”
> Reagan cut higher education funding and student aid, and college costs boomed as a result.
> The College Board estimates that during the 1980-1981 school year, on average, it cost students the modern equivalent of $17,410 to attend a private college and $7,900 to attend a public college — including tuition, fees, room and board. By 1990, those costs increased to $26,050 and $9,800, respectively.
a lot of it can be attributed to spending in non-academics - like administration, sports, etc. these need to be reduced.
Similar to ROTC programs for Army in conjunction with local colleges, why not special sports programs administered seperately but just co-located with regular colleges that go along with the scheduling, etc?
Administrative expenses need to be chopped from the outside, there is no way the current folks are going to reduce that.
Sports alone are generally close to self funding at many universities with plenty showing net profits. It’s not just top schools that benefit, giving alums a reason to visit and specifically care about the school has knock on effects to general donations as well as funding athletic scholarships that pay the full tuition amount.
Some athletic fees are excessive, but encouraging students to use the pool, gym etc has real benefits to student health and can be scaled to actual usage levels.
For major sports it’s mostly donations, game tickets, TV broadcast rights, concession stands, merchandise, etc.
As an example Virginia Tech football tickets are start at ~500$/season breaks down as 8$/game fee + 400 base price + variable required donation and can go up well over 2k a season for the better seats. It’s a 35,000 seat stadium that’s largely full so your talking a minimum of 20+ million in annual ticket sales just for Football.
By comparison VT has 39,000 students and the athletic fee is 163$ + a recreational Sports Fee of 163$, together it’s 5% of tuition. Which collectively adds up to a similar scale as just one sports ticket sales, but covers general facilities used by any student. Looking across all sports and revenue streams the recreational sports fee clearly isn’t the major funding source and as football etc contribute indirectly to the schools general fund their clearly close to break even if not a significant money maker.
Less taxes does not mean dropped taxes. More succinctly, the proportion of government expenditures going towards younger people’s education has decreased than expenditures going towards older people or other populations.
