The strange, twisted logic behind the sky-high cost of college

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

60% : The market model now reigns supreme, even at public institutions.
56% : Schools use "merit" aid to discount the sticker price for pretty much everyone except the wealthiest students.
55% : At four-year public colleges, tuition now accounts for 52% of operational revenue, versus 48% from state funding.
41% : Free college could easily amount to starving public institutions.
40% : Free college could easily amount to starving public institutions, Baum told me, since charging no tuition does nothing to bring down the cost of higher education.
39% : Today students provide 42% of the revenue at public institutions -- double the burden they were forced to bear in 1980.
38% : As public universities increasingly look like private ones in their dependency on tuition revenue, we shouldn't be surprised to see them increasingly chasing full-pay students from out of state or abroad.

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