UC and CSU Students Protest Education Budget Cuts.

March 4th, 2010


The television news in Los Angeles today showed many images of students on various California college campuses protesting the reduction of statewide education budgets. To begin with, I say more power to the students.

However, some of us that have been around a little longer than the average college student unfortunately realized long ago that the power structure in our nation seems to have little real interest in feasible higher education being made available to the populace. [Also see: http://adamvernontrotter.blogspot.com/2010/03/possible-reasons-why-nations-power.html .] If a student does not have the money for college or is unable to find a source for the necessary funds, then the student is typically given the opportunity to sign away the near-term future of their life by assuming the significant debt of student loans to pay for their college education – loans with a payback time of five to twenty years.

With some exceptions, this financial dilemma seems to garnish only minimal sympathy from the universities and colleges of our land – non-profit entities that often seem to have the ultimate goal of gathering as much revenue as possible to buffer their endowments and typically amassing the revenues with such deftness and ability that would warm the heart of the most ruthless of corporations. It’s also quite clear the cost of education in the United States does not subscribe to any economic norms as the promise of education naturally seems to prey and play on the hopes and dreams of the students and their families.

The schools [with some exceptions] seem to have little sympathy for the plight of the students because, short of domestic students acquiring the necessary funds for college, it’s evident that most universities seem to prefer foreign students to domestic students anyhow. The students of foreign nationalities apparently have money to pay for their schooling and don’t complain or make noise about anything – obviously unlike many American students, as attested to by today’s student protests regardless of any justification. Furthermore, when it comes to graduate studies, the nation’s university professors overtly seem to prefer the students of foreign nationalities as the foreigners typically have no life outside of school and therefore are willing to essentially work as slaves to the whims of the tenured graduate advisors – that is, to work all the time and expect no real pay for their slave-like graduate research efforts that inexpensively support the tenured advisor’s research efforts as well.

Your thoughts and comments on the issues and opinions herein are welcome.

AVT