Reporting as it is now known and ideological blinders

 At the link below is an article that appeared in the Boston Globe. It describes LSU's economic struggles in an era of shrinking State support.

http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2015/04/23/lsu-draft-insolvency-plan-jindal-cuts-loom/e2dMpep32tc3GgVU99MHtJ/story.html#comments

What I consider noteworthy about the report is the editorializing of the piece's final sentence:

"State cuts to higher education have sent tuition soaring across the United States, adding to the more than $1.2 trillion in student-loan debt. "

It is manifestly not reduced government support that has caused tuition to "soar". Reduced government support has caused revenues to fall. "Soaring" tuition rates are the remedy of choice by administrators who refuse to cut costs and would rather burden their students with the costs of their own comfort.

It is a combination of an explosion in non-academic (read administrative) hiring:

" Between 1975 and 2005, total spending by American higher educational institutions, stated in constant dollars, tripled, to more than $325 billion per year. Over the same period, the faculty-to-student ratio has remained fairly constant, at approximately fifteen or sixteen students per instructor. One thing that has changed, dramatically, is the administrator-per-student ratio. In 1975, colleges employed one administrator for every eighty-four students and one professional staffer—admissions officers, information technology specialists, and the like—for every fifty students. By 2005, the administrator-to-student ratio had dropped to one administrator for every sixty-eight students while the ratio of professional staffers had dropped to one for every twenty-one students."
 http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septemberoctober_2011/features/administrators_ate_my_tuition031641.php?page=all

and the apparent refusal of college administrations to do what families and businesses do when revenue decreases. Decrease spending. Not for these empire builders, nor for their like-minded friends in the press.

It is no surprise that democrat activists with by-lines, also known as Reporters when Republicans are in office, push this line. It has two objectives, in no particular order of importance;
1) Blame Bobby Jindal, the Republican Governor of Louisiana and,
2) Continue laying the groundwork for forgiving student loans.