Rallying to save affordable public education
Issue date: 9/12/02 Section: Opinions
On Sept. 12, 2001, a group called Students for Affordable Education staged a rally at the IMU, facing the room where the state Board of Regents was holding a meeting to discuss raising tuition at Iowa's public universities by 15-18 percent.
The event was little noted by the media; understandably, given that several airplanes had quite recently crashed deliberately into several large buildings causing thousands of deaths. Such news takes a little getting used to. I'm still trying to get used to it, actually.
But used to it or not, the world, inexorably, goes on, and tuition-talk time is upon us again. What will it be this year? Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty? (Really, someone ought to set up a betting pool on this — the jackpot could go to a scholarship for the lucky winner.) A group of men and women in Des Moines, influenced to some extent by their constituents around the state, decide how much money they feel like giving to higher education each year, and from that number, a much smaller group of men and women decide how much of that shrinking amount should go to supporting tuition costs and how much of that cost should come instead from the students' own pockets. This is a story that happens every year, not a once-in-a-lifetime disaster, but it is a story that we ignore at our own peril.
Some 170,000 students in the United States didn't go to college this year because they couldn't afford it. Like most statistics, that's a fishy one — I don't know, for instance, if it includes part-time students, or if it refers only to students planning to start college but not those returning as upperclassmen — but it's still revealing. There are kids who can't afford a college education, which is something we've always known, but now there's a study to prove it.
Today, I received a press release announcing that the International Committee of The Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York will host a conference called "Education, Globalization, War: Public Education in the Americas" in late October at Manhattan College, CUNY. Education, Globalization, War? Huh?
The event was little noted by the media; understandably, given that several airplanes had quite recently crashed deliberately into several large buildings causing thousands of deaths. Such news takes a little getting used to. I'm still trying to get used to it, actually.
But used to it or not, the world, inexorably, goes on, and tuition-talk time is upon us again. What will it be this year? Ten percent? Fifteen? Twenty? (Really, someone ought to set up a betting pool on this — the jackpot could go to a scholarship for the lucky winner.) A group of men and women in Des Moines, influenced to some extent by their constituents around the state, decide how much money they feel like giving to higher education each year, and from that number, a much smaller group of men and women decide how much of that shrinking amount should go to supporting tuition costs and how much of that cost should come instead from the students' own pockets. This is a story that happens every year, not a once-in-a-lifetime disaster, but it is a story that we ignore at our own peril.
Some 170,000 students in the United States didn't go to college this year because they couldn't afford it. Like most statistics, that's a fishy one — I don't know, for instance, if it includes part-time students, or if it refers only to students planning to start college but not those returning as upperclassmen — but it's still revealing. There are kids who can't afford a college education, which is something we've always known, but now there's a study to prove it.
Today, I received a press release announcing that the International Committee of The Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York will host a conference called "Education, Globalization, War: Public Education in the Americas" in late October at Manhattan College, CUNY. Education, Globalization, War? Huh?
