For higher education, 2009 was a time of lofty goals and harsh realities, of major policy shifts in Washington and financial struggle on campuses nationwide.

In Washington, President Barack Obama called for the United States again to lead the world in college attainment by 2020. Congress poured billions of stimulus dollars into research and student financial aid and reshaped the federal student loan system. Veterans enjoyed vast new benefits and student borrowers with low incomes or public service jobs got new flexibility paying down their debts.

But the defining images of 2009 were thousands of miles away, in California: Students cramming into overcrowded classrooms, parents protesting tuition hikes, activists occupying buildings and breaking windows.

Their anger was focused on massive budget cuts that forced the state's renowned public university system to turn away qualified students for the first time in memory.

"There's transfer students who can't transfer to the University of California because the classes they need to transfer don't exist. Those departments don't exist," said Marika Iyer, a UC-Berkeley student who has been arrested twice in recent weeks at protests. "When the social contract gets broken, people get angry."

California wasn't the only state whose colleges felt the pinch of the Great Recession. But the cuts there were sharpest, and nowhere else were the national trends so vividly displayed: a diversifying population, surging demand for higher education and a system that booms in good times but always seems short of money when it's needed most.

Molly Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said she could not recall another time "when some of the great public universities were cut so dramatically they felt they had no choice but to limit admissions."

Money wasn't the only higher education story in 2009; swine flu hit college campuses especially hard. The American College Health Association reported 87,000 cases, 165 hospitalizations and three deaths.

But hot topics from past years all took a back seat to the economy.

Public colleges laid off thousands of staff and passed on much of their state budget shortfall to students through higher tuition. Private colleges' endowments decreased by 25 percent or more. The richest colleges most noticed the pinch, because they rely the most on their endowments.

Community colleges basked in unprecedented attention from philanthropy, government and the press as millions sought job retraining, and Obama laid out his 2020 targets. But they struggled to accommodate the flood of demand; one Boston community college even ran classes after midnight.