Once Upon a Time: Affordable Education
The story of American college tuition is a story of government abdication and the betrayal of a fundamental social compact. It is also the first in a Centercratic series on how the American education system broke down and how we can rebuild it.
Over the past 45 years, the cost of attending college in the United States has undergone a transformation so dramatic that it constitutes one of the most consequential, and least accountable, economic shifts in modern American history. What was once an accessible pathway to the middle class has become a financial gauntlet. How did we get here?
ACT I: The Affordable Time
In 1970, a student working a minimum-wage summer job at $1.60 per hour could pay an entire year’s public university tuition—just $394—in roughly six weeks of full-time work. The total cost of attendance at a public four-year school, including room and board, was under $1,000 per year.
During this golden era, the affordability of the system rested on a simple, fair social contract. State governments heavily subsidized public universities, covering approximately 75% of operational costs through direct appropriations. The deal was straightforward: taxpayers invested in young people, and those young people repaid that investment through a lifetime of productive citizenship, economic contribution, and tax revenue.
It was a time when attending a public university was within reach of virtually any American family willing to make modest sacrifices. The fundamental promise of American public higher education was kept.
ACT II: Something Shifted
Beginning in the 1980s, state legislatures across the country, driven by a bipartisan failure of foresight and responsibility, made a deliberate policy choice: they began cutting higher education funding to redirect money toward other pressing state priorities, primarily Medicaid, corrections, and K-12 education.
Higher education quickly became what policy experts call the “balance wheel” of state budgets. It was the first thing cut during bad economic times because, unlike the prison system or Medicaid, universities possessed a unique fallback: they could simply raise tuition to cover the gap. And raise it they did.
The data reveals a staggering withdrawal of public support. In California, for example, higher education accounted for 18% of the state budget in 1976-77; by 2016-17, it had fallen to just 12%. The University of California system saw its per-student funding plummet by 65%, dropping from over $23,000 to about $8,000.
Compounding this abandonment was a devastating “ratchet effect.” State higher education funding is notoriously procyclical. During every major economic downturn, including the recessions of 1990, 2001, and the 2008 Great Recession, funding was severely slashed. But when the economy recovered, the funding was never fully restored. Each downturn ratcheted the baseline lower, and universities continuously passed the buck to students.
The historical burden has completely flipped. In 2001, states covered roughly 71% of public university costs, with students paying 29%. By 2025, that ratio practically inverted: students now cover an estimated 62% of the costs, while the state covers just 38%.
ACT III: The Wreckage
The wreckage left by this 45-year betrayal is laid bare in the numbers. In 1980, the average annual tuition at a public university was a mere $804. By 2025, that figure had skyrocketed to $10,340.
This represents an astounding 1,186% increase in nominal terms, shattering the pace of general inflation, which rose by only 280% over the same period. The Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index for college tuition confirms this staggering divergence: a college education that cost $20,000 in 1977 would cost more than $334,000 today.
The human cost of this wreckage is catastrophic. An entire generation of Americans is now entering adulthood burdened by debts their parents never could have imagined. Total student loan debt has ballooned from virtually nothing in 1980 to a crippling $1.78 trillion today, borne by 42.7 million Americans. Home purchases are delayed, family formation is postponed, and entrepreneurship is suppressed.
Politicians effectively privatized the cost of a public good, shifting the massive financial burden onto the shoulders of students and their families, all while continuing to reap the political benefits and prestige of hosting world-class public university systems in their states.
Act IV: The Centercratic Solution
Here is the truth that neither party will say out loud: this problem was created by policy, and it can be fixed by policy.
We know this because we’ve seen it work. For decades, the social contract between states and their public universities delivered one of the greatest engines of upward mobility the world has ever known. A kid from a working family could walk onto a state university campus, earn a degree, and walk out into a life of opportunity without a mountain of debt waiting at the door. That wasn’t an accident. It was a system. It was funded. And it worked.
Centercratic Principle #7: Govern with a Balanced Approach — calls on us to provide to provide essential services, measure results, end what fails, and enforce fiscal discipline. It rejects both government absence and government overreach. Applied here, it means we don’t just throw money at the problem, and we don’t just walk away from it. We rebuild the deal with accountability on every side.
Restore state funding to public universities with binding cost-control requirements.
Any increase in state appropriations must be tied to tuition freezes or tuition reductions. Not suggestions. Not guidelines. Binding requirements with real enforcement. If taxpayers invest, institutions must deliver affordability. That’s the deal. That was always the deal.
But a policy fix alone isn’t enough. Policy follows people. And people follow movements.
This crisis has deepened for over 45 years because no political home existed for Americans who refuse to accept that a public university education should cost a family 96,000 dollars. These are Americans who reject the idea that an 18-year-old should sign away a decade or more of financial freedom before attending a single class. They know that neither political party nor any university has ever put students ahead of its own interests.
There’s a political party that now considers this a top priority:
The Centercratic Party.
Our party was built for exactly this kind of challenge: problems that both parties helped create, that neither party will fix alone, and that only structural, accountable, bipartisan reform can solve. We don’t believe in left solutions or right solutions. We believe in solutions that work, grounded in facts, measured by results, and built to last.
If you are a parent who stared at a tuition bill and wondered how this happened in America, you belong here. If you are a student who borrowed more than you understood because no one gave you an honest alternative, you belong here. If you are a taxpayer who believes your investment in public education should actually make education affordable, you belong here. And if you are simply someone who is tired of watching both parties shrug while an entire generation gets priced out of the promise this country made, you belong here.
The states walked away from their own universities. We are going to bring them back. Not with outrage alone, but with a plan, with accountability, and with the growing force of Americans who are done waiting for the two parties that broke this system to somehow fix it.
This is how we do it. Together. One state, one campus, one election at a time.
Please join us.
This article is the first in a six-part Centercratic series on the new reality of American education, where tuition outruns paychecks, loans stand in for real support, and universities focus on everything except teaching while millions of Americans carry life changing debt. This first chapter tells how states walked away from their own universities and shifted the bill to families.
The next chapters will follow the money through university bureaucracies, research empires, graduate programs, and international enrollment, then show how both parties built and protected the student loan machine. Each one offers a practical path forward, grounded in facts, balance, and a country that chooses to invest in its own people again.