But if Jindal's proposed budget were approved, the patchwork of legislation needed to implement those safety-net provisions would have to pass through the legislature separately.

Hurley fears much of the damage is already playing out. The prospect of cuts has already forced the institutions to draw back on spending and makes it difficult for them to organize for the upcoming school year. "No entity, public or private, can plan in any rational way with this huge unknown out there," he said. "It is sort of unfathomable that a system could receive that big of a cut. That would dwarf anything that has ever happened at the state level in this country."

While Louisiana debates its higher-ed budget, Congress is conducting hearings on reauthorizing the Higher Education Act. The law, which was passed half a century ago to provide federal funding to colleges in an effort to enhance upward mobility for disadvantaged Americans, sparked a national policy debate about college access and saw the expansion of community colleges. Raymond Scheppach, who until 2011 served as the National Governors Association's longstanding executive director, describes the three decades leading up to the Great Recession as "the glory years" for state higher-ed investment.

But public higher ed in the U.S. is no longer the guarantee that it might have been a few decades ago. Rising Medicaid costs and the collapse of the economy both ate away at funding for higher ed. In inflation-adjusted terms, average tuition at public universities has quadrupled in the last 35 years—to $9,139 for in-state students in 2014.

Part of the reason for the shift in funding is political, the philosophy being that individuals should be responsible for shouldering the costs of higher ed. Public universities are different from other public expenditures because they rely heavily on a source of private revenue: tuition. (The state-to-student ratio of LSU's revenue, for example, is roughly 4:6.)

Some experts stress that diverse forces shape the nation's higher-ed economy, and that in some ways universities are accountable for the runaway costs—not state politicians. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, pointed out that total state appropriations have actually skyrocketed in recent decades, in part because of the sheer increase in the number of adults enrolled in college (which is one reason the per-pupil funding has gone down). Campos argues that increases to public subsidies, which he says have led to programmatic expansion and administrative bloat, are to blame for rising tuition.

For Alexander, the problem is that federal policymakers have concentrated too much on forestalling student debt, and too little on offering states incentives to foot more of the bill. It doesn't matter if "you add $200 to a Pell grant anymore because it means nothing [when] at the same time our tuition goes up goes up $950 because of state reductions," he said. "You have to close the back door before you put any more money in the front door."