Over the weekend, the New York Times managed to publish one of the most confused op-eds on the price of higher education that I've ever had the displeasure of reading. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, would like us all to believe that college deans who say they have to raise tuition because of government funding cuts are just fibbing. "In fact, public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the supposed golden age of public funding in the 1960s," he writes. According to Campos, the idea that a degree costs more because states have pulled back their help "flies directly in the face of the facts."

Not really. There are a great number of complicated, interlocking reasons that a bachelor's degree costs so much more today than it used to. And dwindling government subsidies are one of the key issues.

Overall, public spending on higher education has, as Campos argues, risen dramatically over the long term. But so have the number of Americans attending college. When administrators say that government support is shrinking, what they usually mean is that per student appropriations have fallen. This is a crucial point. Someone has to foot the bill for each and every undergraduate's education. If taxpayers don't do it, then families have to pick up the slack themselves....

The military base comparison is weak for a couple of reasons. First, it obscures more than it reveals. We worry about per student funding in higher ed because students pay tuition. Soldiers, of course, do not pay tuition, though they do draw a salary and would probably be quite unhappy were their paychecks were slashed. If that happened, some might reasonably be tempted to accuse the Pentagon of cutting solider compensation, even while defense spending rose overall. Likewise, it's fair to worry about declining student subsidies, even while total education spending heads higher. But Campos's point fails on a more basic level, too. If the U.S. government wanted to run its military bases using slightly fewer personnel to save money, it might be able to do so. Sadly, nobody has yet figured out a way to run a university using drastically fewer professors without sacrificing some educational quality (and no, the Internet has not changed that). While schools have managed to restrain their spending by paying masses of part-time adjunct faculty a pittance, the cost of instruction is still going up. Until someone comes up with a brilliant strategy for making teaching a more efficient endeavor, the fact that states provide colleges with a smaller sum of cash per-student than they did 25 years ago will mean that, for all intents and purposes, education subsidies have been cut. Academia is simply not prepared to do more with less.*