It wouldn't be hard to cut money from colleges. Just get rid of courses about Miley Cyrus, "gender studies," Black Lives Matter, and all those "social justice" classes and get back to the basics of education.
Actually, the main driver of costs at colleges and universities is not frivolous academic courses, including left-wing advocacy, but the growth of administration. At the large public university in the Great Plains where I teach, over the past 20 or so years, the number of administrators and administrative support-staff increased by 50% while student enrollment increase by about 25% and the number of faculty shrank by about 0.4%. Administrators routinely get 8% raises annually, while faculty salaries within rank barely keep pace with inflation (if that) (being promoted from assistant to associate or associate to full professor gets you a one-time raise of about the size the administrators get annually). The same phenomenon is endemic to American academe (and from what I've observed overseas to academe throughout the anglosphere) and is documented in a book by Johns Hopkins professor, Benjamin Ginsberg entitled
The Fall of the Faculty: the Rise of the All-Administrative University. To make the whole thing worse, if you mandate cuts, it will be the administrators, who are often the source of politically correct rot to a much greater extend than the faculty -- sex positive student orientation activities are organized by Offices of Student Life, while official lists of "microaggressions" and language requiring "trigger warnings" in syllabi are promulgated by the Provost's (or Chancellor's or President's) Office (depending on the institution).
The only thing that will really work is for state legislatures and boards of trustees to specifically mandate the cutting of administrative superstructure, the firing of administrative support staff and the return of administrators who hold tenured faculty posts to the classroom (and laboratory, studio or library as appropriate for their scholarly discipline) to do the actual work of a university -- the service of knowledge -- rather than building administrative fiefdoms and lining their pockets with raises when those who do the work of a university get none. Ideally administrators should serve at the pleasure of the faculty as is the case at Harvard and Yale (and was traditionally at Oxford and Cambridge, though I am not sure this is still the case), which would go a long way to preventing them from enriching the administration and themselves at the cost of the institution's core purposes.
