I think the blog post might be onto something, but I agree that I don't think it's all of it. My friend and colleague were just talking recently about how somet

I think the blog post might be onto something, but I agree that I don't think it's all of it. My friend and colleague were just talking recently about how something happened around the mid to late 1990s in the US with college, but it's really hard to put one's finger on one thing or even one set of things, or why they changed around the same time. It's like higher ed just started getting insane around then in several different ways, from cost, to funding, to administration, to culture, to everything. Some institutions managed to resist the insanity longer but it seems like it's spreading. I agree that cuts to public universities are also a big part of it, but that doesn't explain similar trends with private institutions, unless you explain it in terms of "inflation afforded through competitors" that private institutions could accrue. That is, public university funding is cut -> tuition increases at public universities -> private universities can increase tuition by comparison. It seems this would then lead to comparative budget surpluses at private universities though? There's also a lot of trends that seem to have happened around the same time too that don't have anything directly related to state funding. For example, federal grant funds started ballooning around that same time, and the feeding frenzy on indirect funds and pyramid scheme of grad student funding started coming into play. I'd love to have a single coherent explanation for why all of this started accelerating together in the late 90s. So far I've just chalked it up to political-administrative culture in the US (healthcare started seeing similar problems around the same time), but I'm open to the idea there's some sort of unidentified sociopoliticoeconomic explanation. I don't think it's just the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 though.