Is "fix education by starving it" an idea whose time has gone in California?

Nice to see a political analysis of California's higher education problem.  Higher Ed Austerity as political offspring of a failing coalition. (h/t, KTS)

From Inside Higher Ed

The Higher Ed Austerity Deal Is Falling Apart

January 12, 2015

By

Christopher Newfield

For years now, the main trend in public university policy has been to impose budgetary austerity on them. Regardless of the revenue level that universities seek or the efficiencies they announce, the result is always the same: inadequate public funding coupled with rising tuition and student debt.

On the surface, 2015 promises more of the same: more austerity, more fees, more adjuncts, more tech, more management, and more metrics— metrics as a substitute for money. Years of attacks on austerity economics by prominent critics like Paul Krugman have not damaged austerity politics, which favors some powerful interests and which has hardened into a political culture. Our public universities have been stuck in a policy deadlock that I think of as halfway privatization. This has meant the worst of both worlds: not enough tuition and endowment income to escape the perma-austerity of state legislatures, and not enough public funding to rebuild the educational core. 

There are signs now that this framework is coming unglued. One of them is the tuition debate that started up again at the University of California Board of Regents meeting in November 2014. 

Continue reading at Insider Higher Ed