Dear Editor,
Your Jan. 12 article titled “Brown Cuts Funds for UC System” truly hit home for me. These proposed cuts in the budget threaten my, as well as many others’, continuing education here at UCSB. As a result of the $500 million reduction in state funding for the UC system, student fees will skyrocket and many services will be taken away completely. These daunting cuts also prevent recent high school graduates from seeking or being able to afford the education they need to become successful as our future workforce. Many will decide to attend their local community college to get by.
But wait! That educational system will have $400 million cut as well. Looks like we don’t need competent doctors or lawyers, huh? We need to band together as students, as a community, as people, to spread awareness of the projected death to public higher education. Every single person needs to realize how these policies affect their future and how severe they are. I hope to see our whole campus rallying behind CalPIRG’s Rally for Affordable Education on March 4! This is one of the ways in which our community can reach out and demonstrate how these cuts are not to be tolerated!
What we have seen with the election of Jerry Brown is another case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”. Brown’s apparent solution is to submit a set of regressive tax hikes as ballot propositions later in the year. If passed, these hikes would fall primarily on working people, the one’s hit hardest by the recession. Given the past history of this sort of thing, the most likely outcome is that these propositions will not pass, throwing the state educational system even further into crisis. The root problem is that the productive resources of American society have… Read more »
The flaw with the student protests is they aren’t suggesting where the money to fund higher education should come from. No one wants to see he UC system decimated by cuts. But there just isn’t any money.
Unless you can find a way to fund the UC system with unicorn farts, students need to propose where the state gets funding in order to be taken seriously.