To me, the key thing about Buttigieg's higher ed statement is that he's indicating he doesn't want to fundamentally change the system, just make it a little more progressive. He doesn't want to bring them back into line with their historic mission, in other words.

It's worth putting it this way, because the current public higher ed system is built, fiscally, around extracting revenues from students, through tuition. It didn't used to be. But it is now, thanks to a generation of GOP activism (and neoliberal Democratic acquiescence).

If you're someone who's job is to think about the long-term sustainability of a public university--a trustee, a chancellor, a president--you look at the last 40 years and you see how fickle government funding is. And then you notice how regular and reliable tuition revenue is.

You think to yourself--just as your MBA teaches you to--about the sustainability of your institution. And you come to the conclusion that the only reliable fiscal model is to extract from student-customers. So you do!

I don't think this is a good way to look at a public university. But you can understand why these people--appointed by business-friendly politicians and boards of trustees that are usually 50% CEOS and bankers--do see it that way. The last 40 years have made it the only way.

You have candidates for president who are proposing to actually change that, who are proposing to fundamentally undo what Ronald Reagan and co did to our public universities: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/from-master-plan-to-no-plan-the-slow-death-of-public-higher-education

And you have Buttigieg clearly proposing NOT TO.

Our universities don't THINK like "public" institutions; they think like businesses. They want to extract their operating revenue from their student-customers, because that's the political and economic climate in which they have existed for over a generation.

To futz with the edges and details of this arrangement will not fundamentally change it. They have to transformed, and the upshot of Buttigieg's statement is that he will not.

Happy ten-year anniversary to "They Pledged Your Tuition":
http://www.cucfa.org/news/2009_oct11.php

The other thing people forget about when it comes to this sector is that we massively expanded the number of public colleges and universities in the postwar period, until the moment when we stopped (circa Ronald Reagan). Population kept growing, obviously.

Look at the dates on the expansion of the UC and CSU system:

In 1965, the UC had 8 campuses and the CSU system had 20; since then, it's added 1 UC campus and 3 CSUs. At the same time, the population more than doubled.