ABSTRACT
The current decline in state funding for higher education did not originate in the recent recession. Rather, the decline results from a longterm economic weakening of the public sector, and the consequent erosion of public support for higher education. The link between the long-term fiscal crisis and the decline in public support for higher education will be most evident as we explore the sharp shift between campus growth in the 1960s and erosion in the 1970s. The erosion has not been uninterrupted. The fiscal crisis is the result of policies intended to increase the nation's economic "competitiveness." In the postwar era of the 1950s and 1960s, the United States dominated world trade, and the dollar provided the foundation of the international monetary system. Prolonged fiscal crisis in education, then, can produce social effects that are no more visible than the movement of glaciers—but which transform the national landscape all the same.
