You don't even have to leave the first paragraph to see that there has been a real and significant decline over decades: "The University of California at Berkeley, one of the leading public research universities in the nation, now receives only about 13 percent of its budget from state appropriations, compared with about 50 percent a few decades ago."
How does that indicate that the actual amount of spending went down? That just says that the growth in the allocation from the government has not kept up with the growth from other sources.
