[S]tate support for public colleges has not recovered from the last recession, which decimated state budgets. For each student they enroll today, public colleges get 13 percent less in taxpayer funding than they did in 2008, a loss of nearly $7 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars.
To keep the economy healthy, we have to be able to use colleges as a shock absorber in downturns, and that requires changing how and how much we fund them before a downturn hits.