From today's Chronicle of Higher Education (reg req'd):

The measure, which has been wrapped into the House's plan to reauthorize the Higher Education Act (HR 609), would assign institutions a "college affordability index" based on a comparison of their rate of tuition growth to the Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation that has averaged around 3 percent or 4 percent in recent years. Colleges that raised their tuition by more than twice the rate of inflation for three consecutive years would be required to submit "action plans" outlining steps they would take to slow the rate of growth.

If colleges failed to comply with their plans after two years, they would be put on "affordability alert status" and could face an audit by the Education Department's inspector general. Their accrediting agencies would be notified of their failure, and a detailed accounting of their costs and expenditures would be made public.

You truly have to wonder if there is something in the water in Washington, D.C. This is a great idea! We will have a bureaucracy in Washington that monitors the pricing behavior of some 3,000+ institutes of higher education and put them on a "watch" list when price increases are greater than the CPI changes? Can someone please send Congressman Howard P. (Buck) McKeon, a Republican from California, and author of the measure, macroeconomics and a microeconomics textbook? As the CPI is an average of a large basket of goods, including gasoline and pickled pork brains (okay, those may not be in the basket), pegging the legal increase in the price of a good to the average price changes of all other goods is pure insanity.

Here in Texas individual public schools were granted the ability to set tuitions according local market conditions - previously all tuitions had been set in Austin. Of course tuition rates have adjusted as schools reach new equilibrium prices, but at the same time so has the amount the state is providing higher education.

From what I have read of other states, this trend is almost universal. Public education is slowly becoming more "privatized," by which more of the cost of a student's education is paid by the student and less by the general treasury. There are good arguments for why this might be efficient, but don't tell that to the Aggie Mom and Dad who has seen their tuition bill increase 20% in the past two years.

At my humble school of 25,000 we are not spending much more per student although state support for the school has been falling over the past few years. It seems a little naive for the state to cut the subsidies and then pitch a fit when schools raise tuition to cover the lost subsidies.