Quote Originally Posted by steelreserve View Post
So, suddenly we went from "The cost of college is super inflated because so much money is wasted by administrators spending like drunken sailors on stupid shit," to "Actually, it's because they're underfunded by the government and it's because of red-state Republicans that it's that way everywhere." These are not exactly two viewpoints that support each other.

Then again, sometimes I forget that I'm talking to someone who was prone to saying things like, "People are just plowing their cars into crowds of protesters!!" instead of "Liberal hate mobs are trying to drag people out of their cars and beat them to death, and some of the attackers got run over while attempting to murder someone." So I guess I need to remember to temper my expectations.
Again...you're ignorant of the actual facts regarding higher ed funding and budgeting and attacking the presentation of them because you feel the need to burnish some ideological point.

The facts that college costs have soared due to bloated admin salaries and more of that cost has been passed on to the students via tuition due to dramatic decreases in state funding can both be true at the same time. It isn't a complex relationship.

Colleges spend money on stupid shit because they have no idea how to consistently attract students. Largely because no one has any idea how to consistently appeal to 18 year olds. Then the money tap gets turned off at statehouses because it is the cool guy move and conservative street cred flex to hold the liberal brainwashing institution responsible for the current culture war buzzword of the moment. Colleges aren't going to stop spending cash, so they pass that on to the students as tuition increases. Meanwhile, they cut teaching dollars and continue to spend admin dollars in a quest to attract more students.

Maybe California is different....I don't know. I don't live and work there. But I have been involved in higher education in my home state for over two decades and the above is an accurate and straightforward capsule summary of how the publicly funded university system has functioned here. Not sure why it comes across as controversial or problematic. It is just history.