HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Starving the Beast Prompts Choleric Call to Fatten a Sacred Cow.

Starving the Beast is a dark and brooding documentary that paints public higher education as being in a death struggle with diabolical, shadowy right-wing figures who want to slash funding.

In North Carolina, however, more than $3.8 billion was allocated to the UNC system and community colleges combined in 2016—a 4.8 percent increase over the previous year, and a 1.6 percent increase over a five-year period, according to Inside Higher Ed.

Higher education appropriations for the UNC system alone total roughly $2.8 billion and account for 13 percent of the overall state budget. Also, a tuition freeze was recently put in place, and student fee increases were capped at 3 percent.

North Carolina is ranked fourth in the nation in various studies in terms of state higher education funding, and fifth in the lowest share of total costs for individuals or families.

And despite Nichol’s claim that there is a conscious effort to financially disenfranchise minority students, the state, among other things, has passed the “N.C. Promise” tuition plan to cut tuition costs by $500 per semester beginning in fall 2018 for in-state, undergraduate students at UNC Pembroke and Elizabeth City State University—two historically minority institutions—as well as Western Carolina University.

Across the country, higher education is accessible to more students than ever, regardless of their socioeconomic status or race. Over the years, as access has expanded, so has higher education funding. Writing for the Atlantic, Paul Campos found that overall state spending increased by an inflation-adjusted 48 percent over the past 35 years, and overall government spending per student is “greater than ever before.”

Nevertheless, Starving the Beast plays off the contention that there is a battle to disrupt and reform America’s public universities through budget cuts and a “very toxic ideology” of consumerism and the use of cost-cutting technology.

Well, no, but that would be nice. Higher education is ripe for reform.