I think Danielle Douglas-Gabriel of the Washington Post may be onto something here.

College tuition is getting more expensive. Here’s who’s actually to blame.

In an op-ed in the New York Times over the weekend, University of Colorado law professor Paul F. Campos offered a provocative answer to the frequently asked question: why is college so expensive these days?

Campos says it’s because colleges are expanding their administrative staff and paying them big salaries, which drives up costs for families. And he argues that this is happening even though state spending on higher education has actually skyrocketed.

Some of this is true, but it’s a bit more nuanced than the article suggests.

He writes: “Public investment in higher education in America is vastly larger today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it was during the golden age of public funding in the 1960s…In other words, far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education.”

Indeed, states have increased their higher education budgets since the 1960s because of the explosive growth of the number of students enrolled in college. But the amount of money states spend on each of those students has been in flux for decades and sharply fell during the 2008 economic recession. Legislatures responded to dwindling tax revenue at the time by slashing higher education funding by 23 percent per student, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank.