I'd love to see it happen, but keep in mind that not all democrats are gung-ho about raising taxes for things like education (or cutting spending in other areas

I'd love to see it happen, but keep in mind that not all democrats are gung-ho about raising taxes for things like education (or cutting spending in other areas). I'm trying to find total funding numbers for public universities and am coming up short on nicely formatted nation-wide data. However, it looks like in CA, UC per-student public funding dropped from $23,000 to $8,000 from the late 70s to 2017 [1]. In the same time period, tuition went up from $630 (in 1976 dollars) to $12,630 last year. I can't find comprehensive information on the third big component of funding - alumni donations, but at UC Berkeley they have been growing significantly year over year for at least 7 years [2]. States are very different in how they fund schools, though. For example, Texas has a sovereign wealth fund that generates a huge amount of money. In Massachusetts, tuition growth outpaced per-student funding cuts over the last 15 years - look at chart 7 in [3]. Anecdotally, it seems like total funding is going up with tuition, but the money is going towards things like student annexes, stadiums, ancillary faculty salaries, etc. that generally have little to no impact on education outcomes. [1 worth reading - some interesting data] http://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in-california/ http://www.ppic.org/publication/higher-education-funding-in-... [2] http://www.dailycal.org/2016/07/17/uc-berkeley-receives-record-number-alumni-donations-year/ http://www.dailycal.org/2016/07/17/uc-berkeley-receives-reco... [3] http://massbudget.org/report_window.php?loc=higher-education-funding-in-massachusetts.html http://massbudget.org/report_window.php?loc=higher-education...