As [PERSON] documents, \"All of the over one hundred countries with per capita incomes below $600 have authoritarian regimes made possible by illiteracy\" ([PERSON], 2009, p. 204). All in all, \"these social benefits and their value are poorly understood by the public\" ([PERSON], 2009, p. 255) who have been led to believe by the ruling classes that higher education is an inefficient and wasteful indulgence in the way it operates. In contrast, these wide-ranging, but often indirect and long-term social benefits \"reveal that higher education investment contributes to per capita growth in a highly significant way\" ([PERSON], 2009, p. 226), far beyond the narrowly defined private market value. Clearly, the social benefits overlap with private benefits (say, greater democratic participation benefits both the society and the individual), and [PERSON] accounts for these overlaps in his calculations. But his main point is clear: if we are to truly assess the educational function of creating more possibilities for human flourishing, all of these social benefits that lower crime rates, increase opportunity and decrease inequality must be taken into account. Yet virtually all the privatization rationales for defunding higher education in the last forty years have simply ignored these benefits. As [PERSON] argues, higher education is a \"dual good or a double good... It has obvious private good features like increasing a graduate's personal income, and it has an equally obvious public good status that means market governance will be inefficient\" ([PERSON], 2009, p. 65). Unfortunately, this \"obvious public good\" seems all too often to be unobvious, or at least the price of privatization was concealed from the education debates. When the public is informed about these many values, there is wide-spread support for public funding of higher education, including the humanities, not just the STEM fields.  
Besides this broad-ranging econometric analysis of the private and social benefits, there are also several related myths that have contributed to the decline of public higher education with especially severe consequences for the humanities. [PERSON] provides detailed accounts contrasting the myths with the realities, and I just want to highlight four of them in what follows: myths about tuition increases; myths about the inability to fund high quality higher education; myths about the economic revenues from sponsored research in the STEM fields versus the human sciences; and myths about how technology will serve to lower costs. Again, the capitalist agenda fuels the myths and denies the realities, and it is education itself that often serves to de-mythologize the illusions.  
First, everyone knows that college tuitions have been increasing rapidly, and the common explanation is that state budget cuts inevitably lead to those increases. But the reality is that cause and effect are exactly the reverse: legislators institute budget cuts for higher education because they know that universities can make up the short-falls by increasing tuition, thereby externalizing for corporations the cost now borne by citizens. In times of austerity, higher education is a weak link in the budget battles at the state level simply because of the ease of shifting the funding to private sources, the students and their families, who must directly pay more even as they get less. Other domains, such as, for example, highway funds, have no such handy private resource to bear the burden of decreased state revenues. Consequently, legislators justify budget cuts _because_ universities can increase tuition to cover costs. Very inefficient forms of inequality follow directly from the tuition increases: low-income students now find it difficult or even impossible to attend a university. As [PERSON], \"Nationally, state funding per student has declined about 25 percent in real dollars over twenty-five years--while Gross Domestic Product per capita was increasing by two-thirds. This is a disgraceful disinvestment\" ([PERSON], 2016, p. 137). The only solution is to reverse the pressure to privatize and re-fund our public domains--for the public good and benefit of all. In the long term, that is the most cost-effective plan of action, even though few committed capitalists wish to accept the necessarily greater levels of public funding because of their focus on short-term profit ratios.  
But that raises the next objection: as the \"realists\" declaim, increasing funding is great in an ideal world, but in the real world, high quality education is simply too costly, especially for corporate interests. The only real problem is that the claim is unreal: it is a myth based on a very narrow definition of cost-benefits. As we have seen, there are multiple values of high quality education, and as [PERSON] argues (following [PERSON]), \"Total educational value is a function of direct, indirect, market, nonmarket, private, and social benefits, all overlapping and working together\" ([PERSON], 2016, p. 71). When all of these domains that affect the total \"return on investment\" (ROI, to use the economists' moniker) are accounted for, public spending on higher education more than repays itself; or it would under a democratic socialism that allowed for these social benefits to figure in the educational decision-making. The notion that states are broke and have no alternative is simply wrong. The actual effect on most taxpayers of an annual tax increase would be in most instances negligible. For instance, [PERSON] reports that \"the additional cost to the median taxpayer for a free UC would be twenty-two dollars per year\" ([PERSON], 2016, p. 321). Now that calculation is based on \"free\" tuition, and so graduated tuition plans and progressive tax programs would reduce the tuition costs for low-income students to zero and reduce the loan and private burden for middle class students dramatically. This is, albeit, one example, but the calculations are relatively similar for different states, even though we have been hoodwinked to think that if those making over $300,000 had to pay an additional $1,500 per year in taxes it would be an outrage. The outrage is that those in the 1% cry wolf when these (for them) trivial increases are broached.  
Another deceptive rationale is that sponsored research in the STEM fields brings in huge revenues for universities, whereas the lack of such sponsorships from both private and public sources in the humanities means the latter are cost-ineffective and therefore can, and should, be defunded. This rationale is especially useful to those, like [PERSON], who wish to silence the dissent from the ruling doxa about individual freedom for individuals and free markets when corporations depend upon the commercialization of university research. To most everyone's surprise, [PERSON]'s research has conclusively revealed that the reality is exactly the reverse. In his earlier book, _Ummaking the Public University_, he documented that in the California university system, the indirect research costs (IRC) of sponsored research in the sciences and engineering were much greater than acknowledged, to the extent that the California universities actually lost money even though they received millions of dollars in corporate and federal research funding--a fact that they routinely bragged about in the public media. In _The Great Mistake_ ([PERSON], 2016), [PERSON] further documents the fact that across the nation, the average loss for universities due to sponsored research is on the order of 20% of the total revenue received. In short, the university must make up this loss through taxpayer funding or tuition revenue from the other fields (i.e., with no cost to corporations). To use one of [PERSON]'s dramatic examples, in one year, the University of California's _\"gross_ research income of $3.5 billion translated into a _net_ research loss of $720 million\" ([PERSON], 2016, p. 89). So who subsidizes these losses? Primarily taxpayer funding and student tuition. \"What this means is that university research is subsidized by state taxpayers and by undergraduate students. Does student tuition subsidize research? The answer is yes, it does\" ([PERSON], 2016, p. 94). And what fields does that revenue come from? Primarily from the high-FTE (Full-Time Equivalency) fields in the humanities and social sciences. In one remarkable graph ([PERSON], 2016, p. 99), [PERSON] charts the balance of revenues and expenses by college and division, showing that the arts and sciences, public programs, teachers colleges, social sciences, and humanities--all these fields balance out the losses from the STEM fields. Using Arizona SU as an example: \"social sciences, business, the teachers college, and the humanities, added together, run a profit of about the same $40 million that engineering and the sciences lose.