“How far do we go to make college “affordable” for the children of the educated and wealthy, (how many non-athletic “poor” students do you really think gain admission to UVA?), when much of it is done on the backs (via taxes and reduced services) of families who’ll never attend, or hope to?”
There is a big problem with this statement and that is it assumes that somehow the children of the educated and wealthy are going to these schools (especially the flagships) and enoying a free ride. There was an article not long ago in the NY Times when they pointed out, for example, that UVA was seeking kids who might go to an elite school, trying to make it elite, because many of those kids would be paying near full freight, and because of budget cutbacks from the government, the full tuition and room and board at these schools has often risen to be that of many private colleges.
One of the things people forget is that with tuition, even at full freight (paying the full tuition and/or room and board), that it doesn’t cover the full cost of educating that student (thus if let’s say the tuition is 30k, that doesn’t cover the real cost of educating that student), so almost everyone is subsidized. More importantly, by having the well off kids and the kids from educated parents at the school, who likely are paying full freight or near full freight, it means the school can give more money in financial aid to poor kids, since the pool they have available is fixed. If my kid pays the full tab, that means money that if I was of limited income that would have gone to my kid can be spread among kids who need the money, if my S would have gotten 25k in aid, maybe 5 kids would get an additional 5k a piece, making the school more affordable.
The real problem, if that article was correct, is that a lot of state schools are not using the well off kids to help recruit underprivileged kids, but rather are using them to try and turn the state U, especially the flagships, into bastions for the well off, rather than using the rich kids to subsidize the poorer ones, they are in fact displacing them, and that is a problem. Among other things, because of budget cutbacks and not keeping up with the real cost of education (during the same time that the let’s say the state in that 25 year period went from 10 to 10.5 billion on higher ed, inflation existed, probably making the real value even less than it was 25 years ago,but more importantly, was at a time period when the cost of college was skyrocketing, public universities saw the same rise in costs that privates did (on a percentage basis), but the state didn’t make up the gap, which means the schools are becoming less and less affordable to those of modest means, not only did the tuition skyrocket, but aid dropped, both from federal and states.
As far as why should states help pay for higher education, unless one is of the ignorance is bliss crowd, the answer is obvious. Well funded state research universities are responsible for bringing well paying, high tech jobs into an area, just ask folks in the research triangle around UNC or the area around Austin, for example, and then take a look at the states whose state university system is rather starved, and see what the lack of those kind of jobs and businesses in their own state is. Put it this way, if the state seems to put more emphasis on the football teams than on the education side, it is likely you won’t exactly see a biotech corridor or a silicon valley around them (there are exceptions, of course, U Mich is an outstanding research university that has a big time football program, UT Austin likewise is both)