One of the many casualties of our national obsession with the war on Iraq is the emerging crisis of America's public colleges and universities. The situation is so grave that for the first time since the end of World War II college may become a financial impossibility for a quarter or more of our nation's young people. As nearly every state in the union suffers the effects of a recession and tax cuts, legislatures are slashing higher-education budgets, and public colleges are responding by raising tuition and cutting aid. According to the National Center on Public Policy and Higher Education, tuition and fees at four-year institutions jumped 2 to 24 percent in 2002 in all fifty states. Next year many students will face additional tuition hikes of 10 to 20 percent. In New York, which faces an $11.5 billion budget hole, Governor Pataki has proposed a 15 percent cut in the state's higher-education budget and a tuition increase of about 35 percent for students attending the state and city universities. "Most observers agree [these measures] represent only the opening round in what is likely to be a series of painful adjustments to diminished revenues," says the center's report College Affordability in Jeopardy.

Many students from low-wage households may be forced to drop out. Those who remain enrolled will almost certainly need another job on top of the one or two they already hold down. But work without end spells less time for study. In either case the life chances of many working-class young people are now severely reversed. It is an open secret that good jobs are disappearing faster than new opportunities are being created. Those without a degree are consigned to work as cashiers or domestic workers; in fast-food restaurants or nonunion construction sites, where they will be lucky to find minimum-wage, benefit-free employment.

For many public colleges, budget cuts and tuition increases are not new. States like Massachusetts, California and New York have been running on empty for more than two decades, and their systems are threadbare. Their latest "painful adjustments" include more hiring freezes and early retirements among full-time faculty, a combination that spells further growth in poorly paid part-time, contingent staff; bulging class size; and fewer course offerings. But once fat and sassy systems like Wisconsin, Indiana and Michigan now find themselves under the knife for the first time in recent memory. And state universities throughout the Midwest and the South--where state universities prospered during the industrial boom of the 1980s and '90s--are under siege as well.

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