It is no secret that America's higher education system has a deep history of discrimination and exclusion. Funding for public institutions is still intensely inequitable and--in many cases--the situation is only getting worse. Most states have one or two public institutions with a large financial advantage over their peers. This is the norm, a pattern rooted in intentional choices made a century (or more) ago that most state governments have failed to systematically remedy. In many cases, there are no real systems of funding to reform, since, rather than use a formula or other objective mechanism for identifying institutional need, most tax dollars are distributed based on appropriations from previous legislative cycles. Year-after-year resource inequities are simply perpetuated by the standard mechanisms used to fund our institutions of higher learning. These funding inequities exist primarily because equity has never been the goal. Even today, the main focus of advocates and policymakers is on increasing state allocations; very little is applied to how that money is distributed. This tension, between equity and adequacy, has received significant attention in K-12 policy and research, but is less well defined in the higher education space. To provide a competitive, high-quality education to the majority of the future workforce and truly improve the opportunities of students coming from disadvantaged communities, university funding needs to be systemically, fundamentally reformed to meet the needs of students and their institutions today, with equity as the guiding star.