<p>"the state has a legitimate and compelling interest in ensuring that they don't create a permanent underclassby either pricing out or under-admitting students from low or very low income backgrounds."</p>
<p>Well that is a debatable point. A permanent underclass worked pretty well for the Spartans, but let me grant the point anyway. Having granted your point I reiterate that the subject at hand is how to control rapidly rising college costs not how to allocate college education among the haves and the have nots. If we want more kids better educated we could simply allocate more money to the state schools for the purpose, but that does nothing to control costs or mitigate their rise. </p>
<p>If we don't control the rising costs of higher education then the prospect of either the state or federal government continually allocating monies for higher education at a rate a couple of percentage points higher than the CPI is pretty slim. In other word if we don't find a way to control these costs we are not going to find a way for the government to educate the very people you want to see educated.</p>
<p>Really why does it cost more each year to deliver the same product? Somebody needs to set our university leaders down and grill them on this one. I mean are they getting less good at teaching intro to psychology each year? Have the laws of physics suddenly become even less scrutable? There might be a legitimate reason why it is more difficult to teach English each year. For instance it becomes increasingly inscrtable to me why "scrutable" is not a word if inscrutable is, and why "plain" can be both an adjective and a noun when we already have a perfectly good noun pronounced the same but spelled differently. And why do we have grill and grille?</p>
<p>But the vagueries of English don't justify the ever increasing costs of teaching French. Their spelling makes sense even if their pronunciation does not. The cost of teaching French should not be outpacing the rest of the CPI and neither should the university presidents salary.</p>