In his proposed 2012-2014 budget, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) included $100 million more for higher education funding, a welcome development at a time when many states are cutting back on their higher education budgets. However, as Inside Higher Ed reported, some education administrators are worried that McDonnell’s proposal to cap the percentage of in-state tuition funds that can be used provide financial aid to other students may result in low-income students getting priced out of Virginia’s schools:

Most higher education administrators declined to criticize the governor, but a handful have spoken out against the plan. They noted that the measure would likely have the opposite effect from the one McDonnell intends, making college more expensive, particularly for low-income students.

“Given that tuition has been for some time used as a source to meet the financial need of students, the university sees the language in the introduced budget as likely to have unintended consequences in terms of the net price and affordability for student and families as well as on the capacity of higher education institutions of the Commonwealth to meet the objectives of the Higher Education Opportunity Act,” said Michael Strine, executive vice president and chief operating officer at the University of Virginia.

In the last ten years, “tuition prices at Virginia institutions doubled on average.” McDonnell’s plan also comes at a time when aid for higher education at the federal level is being cut, even as student debt levels continues to break and then re-break records each year.

Earlier this month, 2012 GOP presidential hopeful Rick Santorum accused President Obama of “elitist snobbery” for wanting every American to go to college. Now that Obama laid out more details of his vision for higher education in the State of the Union, Santorum is taking his rhetoric a step further, claiming that Obama’s desire to see all Americans obtain a college degree is about “indoctrination“:

“It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid go to go college,” Santorum said Wednesday in Florida, according to CBS News. “The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?”

Actually, universal access to higher education is about building a stronger economy. The United States used to have the world’s highest percentage of college graduates, but we’ve plummeted to 14th in recent decades, as more and more younger Americans eschew the degrees that earlier generations pursued. According to the National Center on Public Policy and Education, just 35 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in some form of higher education in 2008, compared to more than 50 percent of South Koreans.

And its no secret that those with higher degrees earn more. According to the Lumina Foundation, “Since 1975, the average earnings of high school dropouts and high school graduates fell in real terms (by 15 percent and 1 percent, respectively) while those of college graduates rose by 19 percent.” In 2009, the median annual income of a young college-educated person was $45,000 while a young person with just a high school diploma made $21,000.

Santorum may see this as indoctrination, but those earning more, spending more in the economy, and raising their quality of life through higher education, likely see their degree as something worth having.

Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder (R) spent his first year in office trading in the welfare of thousands of vulnerable Michiganders in order to cut taxes for corporations and the wealthy. Hoping to refocus priorities in 2012, the state’s Senate Democrats have released a new plan that puts Michigan students ahead of wealthy corporations.

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Michigan currently pays out roughly $34 billion in tax credits. Under the Michigan 2020 Plan recently unveiled, $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes would be eliminated. Democrats put the tuition proposal’s cost at least at $1.8 billion. [...]

Under the plan, graduates who spent their entire K-12 years in Michigan schools would be eligible for the full award, which equates to the median tuition level of all public universities — currently $9,575 per year. Those who attended school for awhile outside the state would get a percentage of that amount.

College tuition has tripled in the last 30 years and is only trending upwards. Indeed, college price tags could get as high as $422,000 come 2034. And with student loans increasingly hard to find in a restricted credit market, families could certainly use the help in sending their children to a college close by.

What’s more, Michigan Senate Democrats note that the elimination of $3.5 billion in tax loopholes is only a 10 percent reduction in the tax credits the state already doles out. In fact, the program costs almost exactly as much as the $1.7 billion tax cut Snyder implemented for corporations.

The plan should appeal to Republicans as “it can be done without raising taxes one cent,” said Whitmer. “It’s not about whether Michigan can afford to do this, it’s whether we can afford not to.”

One of the most important issues for the 99 Percent Movement and the Occupy Wall Street protesters who took to the streets in cities across the nation last year is student debt. Average student debt in America has hit a record high of $25,250 per student, while outstanding student debt is around $1 trillion.

Today, New Hampshire voters will select their preferred Republican standard bearer in the GOP presidential primary. But when it comes to economic policy and concern for the 99 Percent, the voters don’t have much of a choice, as the candidates are largely in lockstep. And that is doubly true when it comes to student debt, even as the candidates hope for a win in the state that carries the nation’s largest student debt load, as the Ticket’s Liz Goodwin noted:

New Hampshire college students graduate with the highest average debt in the country: a staggering $31,048 for the class of 2010, according to a report by the Project on Student Debt. And tuition at the state’s public universities is among the highest in America, an average of more than $23,000 a year…Many of [the GOP candidates] have not yet gone into detail about their ideas for the country’s education system. But one issue unites most of the Republicans: getting the federal government out of education, which includes government loans to students.

In addition to having no solutions for record student debt loads, many of the GOP candidates want to dismantle the federal student loan program entirely, calling it an “absurdity” and a “total failure.” When President Obama announced a new plan to forgive some student loan debt, Newt Gingrich derided it as a “Ponzi scheme.”

The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal has some good ideas for grappling with student debt, including mass refinancing of all student loans “into the current low rates the financial sector enjoys.” But even in the state that is buried under the most student debt, the Republican candidates have provided little in terms of solutions.

Parents of children born today should be prepared to pay a hefty price for college tuition, if current trends in tuition costs don’t change. According to new analysis by The Daily, the class of 2034 will pay an average of $288,000 in 2011 dollars at a four-year private school and $123,000 at an average public school.

That’s an increase of 111 percent and 167 percent, respectively, from the average class of 2012 tuition:

New moms and dads with visions of Ivy League degrees dancing in their heads should be prepared to face a bill of $422,320 in today’s dollars if Junior heads off to one the country’s priciest colleges as a member of the class of 2034.

If college costs keep rising as they have for the last three decades, the inflation-adjusted price of four years of tuition alone will more than double at private colleges and nearly triple at public universities by the time a baby born this year is ready to enroll, an analysis by The Daily shows.

Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Cost Project, notes that public universities in particular have been relying on tuition increases to boost revenue and offering less financial aid.

The Daily points out that tuition increases wouldn’t be so bad if family incomes were keeping pace. But they aren’t, as “in real terms, the incomes of families with at least one child under age 18 have grown only about 1 percent since 1987.” Those bleak trends mean that college costs will put even more of a strain on families in the future, and probably result in fewer students being able to receive a college education. For the first time ever, outstanding student loans will exceed $1 trillion this year, and Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards.

AMHERST, New Hampshire — President Obama has laid out an ambitious agenda for America’s high school students, stating that by 2020, he wants the United States to be the world’s leader in proportion of college students. At other times, he has said he wants every student to graduate “college and career ready.”

To many, that would seem an effort to improve America’s lagging educational stature among the world’s largest countries. To former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R), however, that is a sign of Obama’s “elitist snobbery.”

While talking about education during a campaign stop in New Hampshire today, Santorum stated that Obama “said every child should go to college,” then declared, “What elitist snobbery out of this man!” The claim drew cheers from many in the crowd.

Watch it:

Santorum explained that if any of his seven children wanted to become an auto mechanic, he would encourage him to do so and to become the best at it. Why he is ardently opposed giving every student a chance to go to college, however, is unclear.

Santorum made similar remarks at an earlier campaign stop at, of all place, St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal both reported.