Budget Cuts Take Toll on Education
Budget cuts have hit public colleges hard, even as the demand for a well-educated workforce soars.
About 150 other schools, including the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Arizona State, and the State University of New York system, are experimenting with similar redesigns of courses for everything from chemistry to Spanish, often with similar results. Cheaper, better classes are the only long-term solution to the growing demand for education and shrinking funding, says Carol Twigg, founder of the National Center for Academic Transformation.
The economy will some day rebound, of course. But those colleges that are just cutting courses or having instructors lecture in front of ever bigger classes will simply offer lower quality. They won't have solved the structural problems that have led to high costs and low graduation rates. "Thinking differently," Twigg says, "is the only solution."
Emily Brandon contributed to this report.
- < Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
Reader Comments
Communique From An Absent Future: the voice of the students
Like the society to which it has played the faithful servant, the university is bankrupt. This bankruptcy is not only financial. It is the index of a more fundamental insolvency, one both political and economic, which has been a long time in the making. No one knows what the university is for anymore. We feel this intuitively. Gone is the old project of creating a cultured and educated citizenry; gone, too, the special advantage the degree-holder once held on the job market. These are now fantasies, spectral residues that cling to the poorly maintained halls.
Incongruous architecture, the ghosts of vanished ideals, the vista of a dead future: these are the remains of the university. Among these remains, most of us are little more than a collection of querulous habits and duties. We go through the motions of our tests and assignments with a kind of thoughtless and immutable obedience propped up by subvocalized resentments. Nothing is interesting, nothing can make itself felt. The world-historical with its pageant of catastrophe is no more real than the windows in which it appears.
For those whose adolescence was poisoned by the nationalist hysteria following September 11th, public speech is nothing but a series of lies and public space a place where things might explode (though they never do). Afflicted by the vague desire for something to happen—without ever imagining we could make it happen ourselves—we were rescued by the bland homogeneity of the internet, finding refuge among friends we never see, whose entire existence is a series of exclamations and silly pictures, whose only discourse is the gossip of commodities. Safety, then, and comfort have been our watchwords. We slide through the flesh world without being touched or moved. We shepherd our emptiness from place to place.
But we can be grateful for our destitution: demystification is now a condition, not a project. University life finally appears as just what it has always been: a machine for producing compliant producers and consumers. Even leisure is a form of job training. The idiot crew of the frat houses drink themselves into a stupor with all the dedication of lawyers working late at the office. Kids who smoked weed and cut class in high-school now pop Adderall and get to work. We power the diploma factory on the treadmills in the gym. We run tirelessly in elliptical circles.
It makes little sense, then, to think of the university as an ivory tower in Arcadia, as either idyllic or idle. “Work hard, play hard” has been the over-eager motto of a generation in training for…what?—drawing hearts in cappuccino foam or plugging names and numbers into databases. The gleaming techno-future of American capitalism was long ago packed up and sold to China for a few more years of borrowed junk. A university diploma is now worth no more than a share in General Motors.
continued at:
http://wewanteverything.wordpress.com/2009/09/24/communique-from-an-absent-future/
education
What your article doesn't say about California's budget is that while they cut and cut and cut the education budget they refuse to cut the prison budget.
Our prisoners (rapists, murder, drugs) have provided for them food, clothing, healthcare, education and legal advise.
Legislator doesn't want to cut the prison budget because law enforcement organizations (police/guards) give heavily to their PACS.
Bottom line. In California crime pays because look what we give the rapist for free! The first grader or 20 something can't get healthcare or an education but Joe Prisoner can!
I am NOT advocating crime I am merely pointing out what our Gov and legislature has done.
Just Reading This Makes Me Mad
I just found this article. It is October and a few months after this article was published. I read today that the Pakistanis are whining about strings attached to the $1.5 billion per year aid package for the next five years. So can we just forget Pakistan for now? What if we pulled the entire amount and put it toward the states' reduced funding for schools and state universities?
advertisement
