Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Destroying Education in the Name of the Free Market

As the families of millions of American high school students have noticed, the cost of a college education is now at the highest that anyone can remember. While loans are within the grasp of many, if not most, to pay for the expense of this education, the cost of paying back these loans often prices students out of jobs in the nonprofit or public service sector.

In the past, there were some programs available for debt relief for those students who become teachers for a given number of years, these programs have been trimmed back, or eliminated entirely, in the pursuit of balancing state budgets.

As the cost of a bachelor's degree climbs to more than $40,000 at many private institutions -- reaching almost to the median family income (approximately $50,000 per year)-- the last best hope for millions of American high school students is our nation's state or local universities. Until the 1970s, a college education at one of the City University of New York schools was entirely free. Even until the 2000s, many state schools charged only nominal tuition (almost always under $10,000). Yet in recent years these institutions have been gutted by governments desperate to cut back on spending and have suffered the efforts of a Republican Party very suddenly (and conveniently) interested in avoiding deficits.

These universities have, by some miracle, managed to keep their tuition rates significantly below those of most private universities (for example, Rutgers University costs less than $12,000 per year whereas the price tag for a year at Carnegie Mellon University is about five times that. Budget cuts, however, remain underway. Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ), for example, cut $500 million from the New Jersey education budget and his administration furthermore failed to correctly file the papers to win a piece of the $400 million in funding for primary and secondary education from the federal government.

These cuts threaten the ability of state schools to provide a worthwhile higher education to students. Nonetheless, thus far American public universities have managed to survive: the quality education offered at the hundreds of state-run institutions of higher education in the United States remain a testament to the fact that, despite the perennial insistence of the GOP, the private sector is not always capable of providing better services at a lower cost. Schools such as University of California -- Berkeley, Boalt Hall (UC Berkeley Law School), University of California -- Los Angeles, University of North Carolina -- Chapel Hill, Rutgers University, University of Michigan -- Ann Arbor, University of Maryland -- College Park, and a litany of other state schools are all ranked by the US News & World Report as within the top 100, if not top 50, educational institutions in the United States.

Full Article
Source: Huffington 

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