Budget cuts

Higher Education should be available to everyone and not limited by financial considerations. The Free Higher Ed campaign, coordinated by the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute, has been endorsed by numerous academic and labor organizations. Contact Free Higher Ed, 1532 16th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20036; phone: 202-234-5190; email: info@freehighered.org.

The Higher Education Act, which provides more than $80 billion in grants and loans, is up for renewal this year and it is likely that the Bush administration and its friends in Congress will try to do to higher education what No Child Left Behind has done to secondary education. Bush's Education Department "wants to impose stringent national accreditation standards emphasizing graduation rates. Such a policy would create yet another hurdle for students from low-income families, who typically take longer to graduate" ("No Brainer," The Nation, November 10, 2003).

Significant cracks are appearing in California's 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which promised a spot in California's public universities for all qualified applicants. A 20% budget cut from California State University's budget could mean a number of things: this $482.6 million loss could mean turning away 100,000 students or cutting 54,000 courses, or imposing a 90 percent fee increase or cutting 6,700 faculty jobs and 9,200 administrative positions (San Francisco Chronicle, September 4 and 17, 2003). At a time of a poor economy and the rise in the college-age population, many of whom are Asians and Latinos, community college students will be particularly hard-hit. The budget cuts could bump down students from the four-year systems to the two-year colleges, a loss of thousands of community college students (Sacramento Bee, September 13, 2003). In addition, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing fee increases of 10% for undergraduates and up to 40% for graduate students (Los Angeles Times, January 8, 2004).

Across the country, cutbacks of course offerings make it more difficult for students to graduate on time (The New York Times, August 24, 2003). The federal government gives the wealthiest private universities, which often serve the smallest percentage of low-income students, significantly more financial aid money than the public universities with greater numbers of poor students (The New York Times, November 9, 2003). The College Board reports that tuition and fees at four-year public colleges have soared an average of 14.1 percent, while the portion of financial aid going to the neediest students has dropped over the last decade (The Boston Globe, October 22, 2003).