HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: States Are Slashing College Budgets and Raising Tuition.

The proposals are part of a decades-long shift of making students pay for an increasing share of postsecondary education, leading to tuition increases at public institutions that outpace those at private schools. They come as a diploma, a driver of social and economic mobility that fueled the country’s post-war boom, is more important than ever to both individual and state prosperity.

“When we’re saying more and more Americans need to have this education, we’re pricing it so that the vast group that has never had it before can’t afford it,” said George Pernsteiner, president of the State Higher Education Executive Officers association.

Two-thirds of the 165 million U.S. jobs in 2020 will require education beyond high school, according to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. In 1973, fewer than a third did.

Students and families are shouldering a bigger share of the burden. Tuition accounted for about 48 percent of public higher-education revenue in 2013, the latest year for which data are available, according to Pernsteiner’s organization, which is based in Boulder, Colorado. That’s double what it was in 1988.

The process has gone on for decades, driven largely by the fact that entitlement and wealth-transfer programs (ironically, overwhelmingly supported by the professoriate) get higher priority with politicians than higher education spending because they’re more effective vote-buying tools. By supporting a welfare state, academics created budgetary competition that they can’t beat.