Troubled Times for Public Higher Education

Graduate students go on strike at Yale. The California Board of Regents strikes down affirmative action in the University of California system. Massive student marches clog lower Manhattan. Each of these incidents—and many others—testifies to a deep and wrenching, if largely uncoordinated, effort to restructure higher education in the United States, especially public higher education.

As in health care, transportation, housing, and social welfare, the new politics and economics of higher education belong to the campaign—sponsored by Republicans and Democrats alike—to privatize the public sector. Throughout the 1980s as college enrollment rose, federal funds for higher education shrank. Straining to meet their rising share of public university and college funding, state capitals finally threw in the towel in the early 1990s. In 1994, recently elected Republican governors in Virginia, Wisconsin, and New York all pressed for—and largely won—significant reductions in ...