<story><title>A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap</title><url>http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021250505_westneat23xml.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>calinet6</author><text>Robert Birgeneau, the chancellor emeritus of Berkeley, spoke at a fundraising event I attended and said something I thought was poignant:&lt;p&gt;&amp;quot;The University of California has gone from being a state-funded institution, to a state-sponsored institution, to a state-&lt;i&gt;located&lt;/i&gt; institution.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The level at which the State of California funds the university is practically nothing at this point. Alumni donations have filled &lt;i&gt;some&lt;/i&gt; gaps but don&amp;#x27;t nearly cover everything. Tuition has increased to the point where even I, who graduated in 2006, consider it ridiculous. It is now over 8 times the maximum semester tuition I paid.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t imagine considering Berkeley a &amp;quot;great value&amp;quot; anymore, as I did when I was there considering the (excellent) quality of education versus the price. It used to be a sense of pride; that a public university could be so great, to prove the experiment, to show that society could produce academic excellence without falling to the vices of money and the divisions that come with it. Now that experiment has failed, and only those who believe in it strongly—the Alumni and supporters—are upholding it, but that&amp;#x27;s not sustainable.&lt;p&gt;We need to grow up. This fantasy of American individualism is killing us. We need to grow up and learn how to share—and this is the worst part: &lt;i&gt;as we once did.&lt;/i&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>A summer job paid tuition back in ’81, but then we got cheap</title><url>http://seattletimes.com/html/localnews/2021250505_westneat23xml.html</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jseliger</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Well, that’s the part we don’t want to talk about anymore.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;That&amp;#x27;s not true at all: college costs are &lt;i&gt;constantly&lt;/i&gt; discussed. The book &lt;i&gt;Why Does College Cost So Much&lt;/i&gt; is the most comprehensive treatment of the issue I&amp;#x27;ve seen, and it argues that the &lt;i&gt;main&lt;/i&gt; driver of college costs is Baumol&amp;#x27;s Cost Disease.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;It’s that taxpayers back then picked up 90 percent of the tab. We weren’t Horatio Algers. We were socialists.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Universities like the University of Washington are also in a spending arms race: universities are &lt;i&gt;increasing&lt;/i&gt; their per-student spending, even in the face of falling state spending: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/04/public_university_spending_is_up_not_down.html&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.slate.com&amp;#x2F;blogs&amp;#x2F;moneybox&amp;#x2F;2013&amp;#x2F;06&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;public_univer...&lt;/a&gt; .&lt;p&gt;A side note: Danny Westneat is something of a joke among people who read the &lt;i&gt;Seattle Times&lt;/i&gt;, and it&amp;#x27;s a mistake to take almost anything he writes seriously. He&amp;#x27;s the sort of pious liberal that makes intellectually minded and honest liberals crazy because of his tendency to repeat various kinds of half-truths. This is a good example: he&amp;#x27;s right that if Washington picked up 90% of UW&amp;#x27;s tab, tuition would be cheaper.&lt;p&gt;But it&amp;#x27;s also true that if he&amp;#x27;d read more, and read more about the people who actually study this issue, he&amp;#x27;d have a more complete picture of the situation. You&amp;#x27;ll learn more reading this comment than reading his column.</text></comment>