Um, not sure what you are talking about wrt community support? The community, and the state was supporting the university quite liberally. My observations fro

Um, not sure what you are talking about wrt community support? The community, and the state was supporting the university quite liberally. My observations from attending and then later working at a large southern public university is that a bunch of things happened: 1) The financiers got in bed with the financial aid office, figuratively and possibly literally. 2) The campus went on an inexplicable building boom the likes of which no one had ever seen before. The state funded those projects, but they were clearly handouts to construction companies and pork spending. Sickening, really. 3) The quality of the average student plummeted. I blame the financiers for this, too--asses in seats is a thing. So while it may be generally good that more people had access to higher education, at the same time the quality dropped, and I seriously doubt the outcomes for many of those people actually improved over attending community college or perhaps no college. Their debt loads had to be tremendous, after all.