Agree, but when you have scarcity, then you have to prioritize. Leaving the social spending aside, we seem to find money to build a bridge across I80 to help a private corporation with evidently <100 jobs committed, have money to buy $300 dollar brooms for movie producers, and other job creating activities through TIFs or tax breaks etc., when our Universities are producing high paid job opportunities , yet they are first ones on the chopping block. How about Iowa doing something unique and turning Economic Development over to the regents, along with their budget, to take politics out of the equation, and let each Institution evaluate opportunities, based on their expertise in areas of commerce and science?
All these are wonderful ideas, but they are all about how to better manage the decreasing size of the pie going towards growth opportunities instead of towards social spending. There is only so much you can do with a smaller and smaller slice when social spending is taking up more and more of the grand total of the meal every year.
Medicaid was 0% of state budgets before the program came about in the 1960s (the heyday of expanding state universities). It was 6.9% of state budgets in 1990 and 15.9% in 2016 (states, not counting the federal match). Kind of hard to project that forward, but it is probably heading to 20% (or 25%) by 2030 looking at the trends.
Stuff like that eats into support for public universities.