It’s a choice between offering higher-ed opportunities to all income levels, or to only rich people. If you’re giving expensive educations to people who can’t afford it and aren’t paying for it, you have to get the money from somewhere. If you’re a public school, the government helps some, with grants and such, but as the stats show, tax dollars are a small percent of funding. If you’re private, you can give a big “fuck you” to poor people and only let the kids of rich people in.
I don’t have a solution for this, aside from saying that someone besides me needs to pay more taxes (corporations, rich people, etc). I’m not rich, so saying “tax the rich!” is basically saying “tax someone other than me more.” And, yeah, I think we need tax reform, and more income equality - the current discrepancy in wealth distribution is nauseating - but I don’t know how.
Things are badly broken, and it’s leading to the end of the American Empire era. I only hope whoever comes after us learns and does better.