Priorities
What does it say about a society that spends three times more on prisons than higher education?
This year, California will spend an estimated $3.3 billion to operate UC. It will spend three times as much—$9.9 billion—to run the state’s prisons.
I haven’t looked, but I can’t imagine that it’s probably that much better in many other states. What’s even worse:
Titled the “Higher Education Compact,” the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students.
If you depend on private fundraising for basic programs, you are no longer a public university. You are a de-facto private university that gets a lot of public money. To me, this is just further evidence that our obsession with micro-managing people’s lives (e.g., “The War on Drugs”) is having a negative effect on society as a whole, even further than the direct cost in lives.
Our future is no better than our education, and if it’s slipping down hill, even with more and more kids going to college, it’s becoming more and more a remedial system for the tragedy of primary education in this country.
This entry was posted at 9:11 am on 7 October 2007 and is filed under Social. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
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Hi Chris. This follows. If you don’t educate, you’ll have unemployable people, and they’ll end up in jail. Sad, isn’t it.