Blog 69

A  day  of  protests  around  the  country  all  focused  on  costs  to  get  a  higher education, and one  place  behind the situation is California. It has a huge budget deficit of some twenty billion dollars. One of the ways it’s trying to fix that is by cutting one billion dollars from the states university system.

As a consequence they are planning to raise tuition by more than 30%, and it has sparked a massive student up rise about these increased college fees. Some students who work up to three jobs are complaining that the new charges are holding them back. One place to see students, faculty and staff members banded together in anger over the budget upheaval is San Diego State University, a University of California. They say it undercuts the state’s 50-year-old promise to provide students with an affordable, quality education.

One person keen to hear students’ voices was State Sen. Ellen Corbett who attended the rally Thursday morning at the state Capitol. "This should be the beginning of their advocacy throughout the budget process. More legislators and the governor need to heed their call," she said. "I am well aware of the struggles California's students and families are going through because of the cost of going to college. In some cases, students have seen tuition triple, and this deeply concerns me.

Now I’m no expert on educational issues, but it does make me reflect about who is running California and what is being done to support these students in need. Arnold Schwarzenegger is CA Governor and no better way to answer my question is when he told state legislatures in January that the state spends 11 percent of its budget on prisons and only 7.5 percent on higher education. The governor admitted that 30 years earlier the opposite was true — California gave 10 percent of its budget to higher education and only 3 percent to prisons.

Now I don’t know how that came about, and in all fairness I’m not about to spend my whole day investigating, but it does make me think how an earth could sensible people come to this conclusion. I have heard a number of occurrences were beyond the state’s control and some events Californians actually had a say over. We’re talking about propositions that California voters have passed that have hurt education.

There is no point in going over spilt milk, but what I would like to see is someone run the state with a stronger hand for change – supporting students in need of a push in the right direction. One man who could do it is Jerry Brown who is running for CA Governor later this year.