It's fine to FU the administrations, but at public US institutions, a lot of the problem is declining state support for education. In 1970, the full cost of in-state students at the University of Texas was being paid by the state, IIRC. Today, it's 20% or less. The University does what it can to raise money, but... effectively, poor legislative support is going to put pressure on students (and their families) to pay more for education.

I tend to think this needs to be worked out at a national level. If we really want a well-educated populace, we need to find a sustainable way of funding it.

1970 was a local maxima, probably due to the draft and GI bill. We still spend more as a function of GDP; 1973 was 5.7% of GDP, 2017 was 6.8% (2009 was max at 7.5%).

Those numbers are roughly comparable to other countries. We're within a percentage point of GDP of Switzerland, Australia, Germany, the UK and more.

The big issue is the number of students has dramatically increased, but funding has not. We either need to spend a lot more (costs would rival and maybe even exceed healthcare), or we need to cut costs.

My personal take is that we need to trim the fat out of the curriculum. A lot of classes have nothing to do with your major, and exist only to make students "well-rounded". I don't see a compelling reason to use public funds to force electrical engineering or CS students to take English composition classes (hell, I had to take Early Childhood Education to fill a gen ed credit). I barely see a reason to force them to take Calc 2; tools exist to give people the answer to those questions, they're just truncated to a value more precise than anyone could manufacture anyways.

I don't have a problem if Math students want to take English classes or vice versa. I just don't think there's enough public good in it to be worth paying for with public money. How many people actually use those skills anyway? I have never in my career been asked to read a document and look for symbolism. I have never been asked about childhood education. I have never been asked a problem that I needed Calc 2 for. I probably could have skipped half my classes and no one would have noticed.

I don't think that would deliver a comparable education. Speaking as someone who majored in math, got a doctorate in anthropology, and later became a software engineer.

I agree with that, but a comparable education is explicitly not a goal of mine.

My question is whether it would make a comparable workforce, and to that end I suspect it would.

In my mind, the purpose of the government funding education is a return on investment. They're expecting to get more back than they put in over a long enough time horizon. The goal isn't education for the sake of education, it's to create an educated workforce that can produce higher value goods and services.

We can put public money to better use than education for the sake of it. If people want to learn for the sake of it, they can use the library or YouTube or pay for a teacher.

We've got other problems like people without healthcare or homes, climate crisis, a terrible foster care system, etc. Put the money towards that instead of paying for massive buildings and staff to teach everyone underwater basket-weaving so they're "well-rounded".