April 12, 2012 4:34PM # My Advice? Don’t Blame State Taxpayers By [Neal McCluskey](https://www.cato.org/people/neal-mccluskey) --- SHARE I don’t have any great advice to offer those going through the college acceptance wringer, other than to make sure that going to college—and doing college-level work—is really what you want to do. If it’s not, don’t waste your time and money; like so many who’ve gone before you, you’ll likely end up with no degree, a degree you don’t want to use, and quite possibly lots of debt. That gets me to my main point: Blaming high tuition prices on state legislatures, as University of South Florida education professor [Sherman Dorn—but hardly just Mr. Dorn—does](http://education.nationaljournal.com/2012/04/the-land-of-hope-and-dreams.php#2192948) is simply wrong. State and local appropriations to public colleges and universities have risen substantially over the last 25 years. According to the [latest data ](http://www.sheeo.org/finance/shef/shef_data11.htm)from the State Higher Education Executive Officers, inflation-adjusted state and local outlays to colleges for general operations rose from $57.7 billion in 1986 to $74.2 billion in 2011, a 29 percent increase. That’s “increase,” not “decrease.” The one way you could characterize state and local funding as decreasing is on a per-pupil basis, but that doesn’t reflect the heartless budget cutting Mr. Dorn implicates. It reflects huge enrollment increases—enrollment that often ends with [no degree ](http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_341.asp)or [appreciable learning](http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/01/18/study_finds_large_numbers_of_college_students_don_t_learn_much). And even on a per-pupil basis it would be wrong to write as if we’ve seen decades of constant cuts: Spending tends to go up and down with the business cycle, and 2001 saw *record high* state and local spending per pupil for the 25-year period. I hope students waiting to hear from colleges have to sweat things out as little as possible. I also hope people will stop wrongly turning up the heat on state and local taxpayers. When you look at the data, high prices clearly aren’t their fault C/P from the *National Journal’s* “[Education Experts](http://education.nationaljournal.com/2012/04/the-land-of-hope-and-dreams.php#2194613)” blog*.* ##### Related Tags [Education](https://www.cato.org/education), [Center for Educational Freedom](https://www.cato.org/center-educational-freedom) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).