Families suffer, of course, but the long-term impact transcends that. “The converting of public funding into higher tuition focuses the student on assuring her future income to cover higher costs and debt,” he writes. At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business and less like a public good that all students can afford.

The Hechinger Report, which published this story in partnership with The Atlantic, spoke with Newfield to learn more. This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mikhail Zinshteyn: Why are public universities a public good, and why do you think states and the federal government should largely do away with tuition?

Christopher Newfield: Society—culturally, economically, and socially—gets the majority of the benefits. Here I'm using the work of some economists, particularly Walter McMahon, who has actually tried to count up all of the non-market benefits that universities generate.

My parents are first-generation-college people, and they probably wouldn't have gone if it hadn't been free for them. The benefit of that was that society got two more productive, also politically more thoughtful, more complex people that had better health, people that were able to make contributions to their community, because they had incomes that allowed them to work only one job.

What's happened since is, [the reduction in state funding and shift toward operating like a business] is just kind of an arrangement of convenience for state governments, for taxpayers, for business taxpayers, who've gotten a cheaper deal. But, it's economically and socially less efficient to save money this way. It's also philosophically and economically incorrect.

Zinshteyn: What’s one example of the way colleges have been behaving like businesses at the expense of students?

Newfield: They had to look for multiple revenue streams really starting in the 1980s, and some of those were very high-value and glamorous … like technology-transfer revenues through patenting, increasing contracts and grants revenues, and increasing fundraising.

The national statistic is that universities have to put in 19 cents of institutional funds to make up, to get to, a full dollar of their research expenditures. [And] this number is higher at public universities than it is at private universities. The last numbers that I saw are about 25 cents on the dollar of overall research expenditures at publics, and something like half that at privates. So there's a public subsidy that's going on at these institutions, through ongoing general fund contributions, that means that they're just paying more of their own money … and not paying for what the public thinks it's paying for, which is instruction, and some other kinds of core things.