Oh, and one more fun fact about university budgets that may not be immediately obvious to people from outside of the business: all those humanities and social sciences classes that people like to pretend are a waste of taxpayer money? Those are the courses that subsidize the others. They’re the ones that are cheap to run. I can teach English in any old box of a room with an Internet connection, functional HVAC system (alas) not required, and as long as you kick me a section of Shakespeare every once in a while, I’m happy to fulfill all your gen ed English needs for $50K a year. If you get rid of everything except STEM and pre-professional students taking courses in practical-sounding things, your university just got a lot more expensive to run – higher average faculty salaries, more lab courses and practicums involving expensive equipment and strict caps on course sizes, more administrative requirements.
Public university budgets are usually available on the university’s website. For example, at my local public institution, Washburn University in Topeka (a midrange comprehensive institution offering a variety of courses in the liberal arts and sciences, health occupations, business, and law, with a 93% acceptance rate), the 2021 Data Book (PDF!) shows that in FY2019, the university budget was $117.7 million, of which tuition and fees covered just under $40 million. (Federal, state, and local grants and appropriations covered about $60 million, gifts and contributions about $10.8 million, and various miscellaneous sources made up the rest.)
Among their expenses, instruction and academic support (that’s mostly faculty salaries and the costs of items such as the libraries and computer services) are by themselves $56 million, rather more than tuition.
I’m wondering why you think this, since, as others have pointed out, it’s far from the truth.
Yes, we can because it’s all about how you want to spend your money.
We have people who don’t blink when we give the obscenely well-heeled over a trillion dollar tax break but will be aghast when we talk about spending that kind of money on health care or education. We could trim that amount of money off of our defense budget and still have the same capabilities if we got rid of the fat. We don’t need to spend a thousand dollars on a special wrench made to fit a special nut. We don’t have to pay huge amounts of money for designs that never even go into production. Etc.
Remember, that would not be a match at all, since many Universities get bequests, sports fees, grants, etc.
It helps the whole society to have more people college educated, not just the people who go to college.