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tuition hikes
Student debt is becoming a devastating reality for hundreds of thousands of working class young people pursuing a college education. Year after year colleges and universities are raising their tuition and related fees higher and higher, forcing students to borrow more and more money to complete their studies. And the trend looks like it will only be getting worse.
As the economy continues to falter, and state budgets become more and more squeezed, less and less money is being granted by states to public universities. This coming year, many public educational institutions are looking to increase tuition by as much as 11 to 13 percent, which will be on top of a series of years that saw hikes at many of the same colleges.
Predictions are that the Midwest and the South will be hit hardest by this wave of reduced education budgets. The energy crisis in California and the technology downturns suffered by states like Washington, threaten similar scenarios on the West Coast.
The University of Minnesota, for example, is expecting to have to raise its tuition in the double digits range for at least the next two years due to the states refusal to grant it the necessary funding. An illustration of the cutbacks being forced upon schools can be seen by the fact that during the period of 1988-9 the University of Minnesota received 40% of its funding from state appropriations. Ten years later that percentage rate has fallen from 40% to 31.5%.
A similar drop can be seen by looking at other land grant universities, that supposedly exists to provide educational opportunities for working class youth otherwise unavailable, such as the University of Illinois. There state funding has dropped from a rate of 40% in 1979, to about 30% today. As a result this coming year more than a few young people are going to be unable to afford to attend school at such formerly affordable institutions like the U of I campuses of Chicago and Urbana.
The refusal of the states to re-considering their spending of millions upon millions in corporate welfare from the shrinking state budget pies when colleges and universities are screaming for more money has even resulted in the unacceptable scenario of colleges having to slash spending half way through the school year, resulting in easily imaginable hardships and inconveniences for students who need certain classes and services to graduate. Such has been the case though this last year in states such as North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. It was also the case in Iowa, where a faltering farm economy forced the University of Iowa, Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa to cut their budgets mid-year by $42 million.
What does all of this mean for the average student? Hardship, and lots of it. It results in many students having to take an extra to graduate because needed courses can't be offered every year. It means fewer and fewer grants and scholarships. It means over-crowded classrooms taught by over-work and under-paid faculty. It means the average student walking away with tens of thousands of dollars in debt in an economy that denies many any hope of easily or quickly earning enough to repay it. And saddest of all, it means thousands of working class young people, many no doubt with enormous amounts of talents and ambition to learn, either being forced to drop out before graduation, or never even having the opportunity to take classes.
And as if to intentionally add salt to the wound, this last year Congress pass legislation that will deny access to federal tuition assistance to any young person convicted of a drug related charge. Such laws probably won't hurt George Bush's daughters too much, but it probably will their less affluent friends who experiment with the same substances!
This is the unfortunate reality of higher education under capitalism, a system that places the narrow pursuit of profit above all else, including education. Despite decades of struggles to ensure that the children of working people had the opportunity to get a higher education and to be exposes to the exciting atmosphere of liberal education, this gain is being chipped away block by block. At the current rate of tuition hikes and mounting debt, it's only a matter of years before America's college campuses return to the days when only the children of the ruling class can afford the "privilege" of a higher education.
Such a reality however is not a forgone conclusion. The resources exist to halt this trend of rising costs, in fact the resources exist for education to be provided free of charge, from kindergarten to graduate school, for each and every American, of any age or background, who so desires. If anyone doubts this simply look at Cuba. Tiny little Cuba, which has at its disposal a tiny fraction of the resources available to the United States, is able to do such a thing. In fact it opens the doors of it education institutions to thousands of poor and unfortunate young people who want to learn from around the world each and every year.
What we need in this country is a mass movement of young people and workers that sets as its sight the conquering of the university from those who would use them simply for their affluent children and for corporate research, and the turning of these colleges into genuinely public institutions, that offer their services free of charge. We must never accept the argument that what is happening is inevitable, or that with a declining economy such as ours we all need to take cuts, cuts for the "team." This economic crisis is not our doing, we shouldn't have to suffer from it; education should not have to suffer from it. And if we need to wrest the state and the economy from the hands of the greedy capitalists who have led us to this state of affairs, so be it.
