College Students Protest For Their Right To Spend Other People’s Money

posted at 1:31 pm on March 4, 2010 by Laura Curtis
[ Education ]    printer-friendly

Over 120 protests in 33 states are scheduled today as students and their professors “challenge administrators and state lawmakers to ante up.” At the heart of their grievances are the budget cuts states are making in taxpayer-funded colleges and universities. Classes are canceled, waiting lists are growing, students are taking loans, jobs and sitting out semesters in order to pay for their educations.

“I want people to question where the priorities are — to see people getting together to accomplish a goal, by creating awareness for something as simple and as basic as the right to be educated,” Keller said.

Miss Keller is wrong. There is no “right to be educated.” She is entitled to seek out an education, but not to have taxpayers deliver one to her, even in part. States are cutting budgets in many areas, and there is no reason why tertiary education should not feel some of that pain along with roads, entitlements, elementary and secondary education, and pretty much every other area of life. If colleges are finally weaned off the government teat, perhaps they’ll make a real effort to reduce costs, which have risen four times faster than the rate of inflation, to levels students can better afford.

I agree that now would be a good time to for people to question their priorities. More and more people are concluding that our taxpayer-funded colleges lack accountability, common sense, and are a bad bargain. For example, Fort Hays University in Kansas used stimulus money to pay students to earn C or better grades. A lot of parents are tired of paying top dollar to give leftist, race baiting, anti-American, plagiarizing nut jobs the privilege of indoctrinating their children.

Not everyone should go to college, and not everyone should go to college right out of high school. There are many benefits to learning a trade and then going to college later on in life. In my husband’s case, he started as an electrical helper, worked his way up to licensed electrician, and went to night school in his thirties to get an electrical/electronics engineering degree. He practiced values that millennials have largely avoided – delaying gratification and being self-supporting. He wonders why – having paid for his own higher education – he should pay for someone else’s. After all, this is schooling they are voluntarily undertaking and from which they’ll benefit by higher lifetime earnings. The fact that college students have the audacity to protest – and in some cases, protest violently – at being required to pay for it illustrates that they badly need an education. Just not the one they’ll receive from a university.

Crossposted.

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