At long last, Washington State has agreed to relinquish its hold on the tuition purse strings of the state’s five public universities and The Evergreen State College. It was a particularly hard position to defend as state funding of the schools has fallen below 50 percent, and the Governor and Legislature want to cut slash higher-education funding by “as much as $642 million over the next two years,” as the Seattle Times reports.

House Bill 1795 passed by wide margins in the House and Senate, and Governor Gregoire has said she’ll sign it. For the next four years, from 2011-12 to 2015-16, the schools will be able to set tuition as they see fit. The bill does require the schools to provide financial aid to lower-income students, paid for out of the tuition increases, and sets a minimum of 4,000 students for the University of Washington’s in-state freshman enrollment, beginning 2012-13. It also allows the schools to price degrees differently, to account for the disparity between the cost of a liberal arts major and any field that will allow you pay back student loans.

Interestingly, the bill has a goal of “increasing the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by Washington’s resident students from the 2009-10 academic year levels by at least six thousand degrees completed or by twenty-seven percent”–per the task force finding that raising tuition rates will yield higher graduation rates.

What does this mean in tuition dollars? Well, the rocket ride continues, despite tuition being forced out of any real relationship with expected income upon graduation. The Times runs the numbers:

Students at the state’s three big universities are already paying almost 30 percent more in tuition than they did in 2008-09 because of state funding cutbacks. If the Senate’s version of the bill passes, students at the UW, Washington State University and Western Washington University will see tuition climb by nearly 35 percent more over the next two years.

For those of you in search of round numbers, that’s UW tuition of $11,567 by 2012. Proponents of tuition increases insist that’s a “bargain,” since in-state tuition at UC Berkeley will set you back $13,360 in 2011-12. If you’re from out of state, be prepared to cough up an extra $22,000 per year.

Now in a purely numbers-to-numbers comparison, there’s not much to carp about then. The University of Washington is a major research university with a worldwide reputation, and there is probably some truth to the notion that you can raise graduation rates by dismissing that tier of students who want “to go to college” because that’s what everyone else in their high school senior class is doing, and the UW is such a great deal.

Conversely, from a numbers-to-numbers comparison, it seems reasonable for lemmings to jump off a cliff together. It is troubling to find ourselves using California as a model, since the state is shorter on funds than even Washington (though for similarly conflicted reasons), and so has turned to cannibalizing its world-renowned higher education sooner.

If you think the recession only spurred on a slow-motion education funding crisis, there’s not much optimism to be gleaned from a four-year plan to test the limits of the affordability of a Bachelor’s degree. To advance that viewpoint, here are a few data points from an article I wrote earlier:

…in the U.S., higher education costs have risen 439 percent since 1982, which is more than medical care (251 percent) and certainly more than the Consumer Price Index (106 percent). In contrast, the median family income rose 107 percent in the same time period, and from 1997 to 2006, the number of students borrowing via Stafford loans grew by 33 percent (total loan dollars doubled).

It’s that last point that’s most disturbing, because the higher education bubble relies upon finding students who can and will buy into our age’s indentured servitude.

So when Washington State agrees to let public universities raise tuition only if some goes to financial aid, that’s more enabling than compassionate. Note the way the aid is even structured: Under the new legislation, a family of four making over $54,500 (70 percent of the median family income) is eligible for aid, yes, but on just 50 percent of that $11,500.

While the schools celebrate their new tuition autonomy, and decide how much more than seven percent per year tuition will rise, it’s worth remembering that median Washington household income for 2010 was projected to fall by $1,000 to $55,379.