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Higher education key to reviving economy
Commentator Richard Hernandez says education spurs entrepreneurism and responsible citizenship.
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Kai Ryssdal: Our election coverage this week isn't so much about candidates and platforms and promises and campaign spending. It's about voters. Actual people. And what will matter to them most come November.
Today, Richard Hernandez and the state of higher education.
Richard Hernandez: I am a community college student in Los Angeles. And I want to hear the candidates spell out what they're planning to do to make higher education more affordable and more accessible.
In California, public colleges and universities were hit hard by the recession. The state closed its budget gap in large part by slashing funding to higher education. Fees and tuition have risen as a result. At the community college level, fees have doubled and are set to increase again this fall.
But despite the higher fees, schools are cutting their course offerings. Winter and summer sessions have been eliminated from many schools, and fewer and fewer classes are being offered during the regular semester. Many students are faced with the reality of having to extend their education plans by another semester or two, or even a year or more. This is especially tough on students hoping to transfer from community colleges to four-year universities. If you can't get into the classes you need to transfer, you can't transfer.
We can best solve these problems by stopping the budget cuts for higher education. It's ridiculous that students across the country have less access to an affordable education. It's ridiculous that middle-income families don't know if they can send their children to college even though they've been saving for years. If our goal really is to revive this economy, we should start by getting as many students through college as quickly as possible, so they can become productive members of society.
I'm looking for a presidential candidate who understands the social and economic benefits of an educated workforce: less crime, more community involvement, increased entrepreneurial activity, higher wages, greater purchasing power -- all these things benefit society as much as individual students.
We need a president who will reinvest in education; someone who will help students achieve their goals by making college more accessible and more affordable; someone who won't be anything like the politicians who created our current predicament.
Ryssdal: Richard Hernandez is a second-year community college student in Los Angeles. Tell us what matters to you most in this election year -- write to us.
@letterman --What you say is also true. The wasteful spending that constantly occurs in education, both on the state and federal levels, needs to be cleaned up. Audit our institutions, reorganize and slim down the amount of employed administrators, wipe out unnecessary (and truly counterproductive) regulatory restraints by limiting government intrusion...all of these things--combined with NOT cutting classes, stopping the cuts to higher education institutions, not proposing to cut student financial aid--will move higher education in the right direction. We can streamline education and still have it be well funded, making it accessible to all, those ideas aren't mutually exclusive.
Yes, I'm sure that politicians truly do understand the importance of an educated workforce...but they do an outright lousy job of supporting the creation of one.
Sure, Richard, that sounds all well and good, but let's take a step back to understand what is driving up the price tag of a good education. If you look at the research, it is actually all the administrative garbage and regulation that has taken over the institutions of higher education. Look at the sky rocketing ratio of administrators to actual teaching faculty. Those administrators come at a huge cost! And if you ask the colleges and universities why they have them, many will point to them as costs of complying with the myriad of government regulations that they have to comply with. So, what you are effectively lobbying for here is an elected official to come in, get rid of all the feel-good, make-sure-no-one-is-mistreated or -unrepresented regulations that are killing us and get back to people paying for faculty and researchers.
No one argues that an educated workforce isn't good for America. The answer isn't throwing more money at the problem; it is removing the garbage in the system that made the cost a problem in the first place.
