Well the article disagrees with that claim, "Appropriations per student are much higher now than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, when tuition was a small fraction of what it is today." so I guess it would be time to go to the references/data if we had them.
[1]"States are all over the map on their retreat from higher education. At one extreme are the two states that have managed to maintain their fiscal 1980 investment through 2011: Wyoming (+2.3 percent) and North Dakota (+0.8 percent).
But these are the exceptions. All other states have reduced their support by anywhere from 14.8 percent to 69.4 percent between fiscal 1980 and fiscal 2011."
This covers roughly the same time period as in the article. Only there is something different going on: state appropriations for higher education is going down.
