South By North Strategies, Ltd.

Policy Shop does some simple math and notes that “cuts to higher education lead to rise in student debt,” even in North Carolina.

Even states such as North Carolina, long recognized for their generous investments in higher education, have begun to follow the national trend of disinvestment.  A brief by the North Carolina Justice Center found that public postsecondary institutions in North Carolina sustained a $917.2 million cut in the 2011-13 state budget, reducing appropriations for post-secondary education as a share of the North Carolina economy to a 40-year low.
—
Yet last week a Congresswoman from this state could not understand why students are going into debt.
—
U.S. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC) said she has “very little tolerance for people” with a lot of student debt. Congresswoman Foxx believes that because she put herself through college without debt in the 1960s, others must be able to do the same today. She fails to understand, however, that when she graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1968,tuition and fees were 228 percent lower than they are today ($2,221 per year in 1968-69 vs.$7,313 in 2012-13, adjusted for inflation).