One of the Worst Explanations You’ll Read of Why College Is So Expensive

So tuition has gone up by 350%, but subsidies have decreased by less than 20% per TE student, at the same time that the number of academic staff has stayed roughly the same.

The only linked study says that tuition increases were larger in years with drops (in the tens of percent) in state funding, but the increases were not reversed when the funding returned, nor, in fact, did tuition even stop growing in those years.

Furthermore, the same linked study says that actual tuition revenue per student grew faster than ticket price tuition per student as colleges found other ways to maximise the revenue from students.

Yet the article still claims that declining state subsidies are a "key reason" for tuition increases?

I agree the NYT article was weak, but this one seems willfully ignorant of the implications of its own statistics.

NB: It's also interesting that the linked to study points out growth in operations as one of the largest cost centers over the time (the claim of the OP), but still not a vast increase. It doesn't include capital expenses, in an obvious way. So we're still none the wiser why costs have increased at 200% of the rate of the median family income over the period of the report (up until 2008).