I was told an interesting anecdote about something that happened in the budget conference committee yesterday. In the course of expressing his antipathy for higher ed, Perry mused that he has no regrets about most of the decisions he has made during his time in office, the one exception being tuition deregulation. It is understandable why Perry would feel this way. One facet of his current dispute with the higher ed community is that he feels that the cost of education is too high (and it is), and that it puts a college degree beyond the reach of the middle class. But he can’t really make that point  because he signed the bill deregulating tuition. If the cost is too high, it’s his fault. Full disclosure: I supported tuition deregulation at the time, even wrote a column about it, on the grounds that the Legislature would never fund higher ed at an appropriate level. Patti Hart also wrote a column about it, after the fact, about how dereg would shut the middle class out of UT.