They could start by stopping the flow of money out of Washington.

Emma Baccellieri writes at the Providence Journal.

Congress looks for ways to cut college costs

As college costs continue to climb, Congress is taking a fresh look at federal financial aid and considering ways to stop states from driving up tuition at their public universities.

Noting that more comprehensive financial aid policies will be useless if costs continue to skyrocket, higher education experts urged lawmakers last week to hold states accountable for funding public colleges and universities.

“Now’s the time that we do need federal leverage to make sure that states do not abandon their responsibility for higher education,” F. King Alexander, president and chancellor of Louisiana State University, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

In a hearing on the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, Alexander described declining state funding as “the greatest challenge facing higher education today.”

Funding for higher education routinely has been slashed from state budgets over the past two decades, with cuts growing deeper in the years since the Great Recession. Public universities have increased tuition in response.

Louisiana is an especially bad offender, having decreased its spending per student by 42 percent since 2008 — second only to Arizona, which has decreased spending by 47 percent. Montana posted the lowest decrease, at 2 percent.

But the rest of the country is not far behind, with 31 states having cut per-student funding by more than 20 percent in the years since the recession, according to a study by the left-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.