| Perhaps the problem is that they're spending too much on the education. BLASPHEMY! You may be thinking, education is PARAMOUNT to any civilization! We musn't cut spending on education! Does anyone here live in the Phoenix, AZ area? If so, take a tour of ASU's recent campus renovations. The new dorms look like luxury-condos. The buildings around campus match. ASU has gotten into the habit of buying up the most expensive property available, and developing high-end real-estate on top of it. Do we really need that? What we need are desks, blackboards, and good professors. I could not care any less what the building I'm studying inside of looks like. Are campus aesthetics really that important, or even relevant at all, to higher education? No. The answer is that no, they are not. It seems cliche' for a geek to get bent out of shape about it, but lets also look at the sports teams. How much money is spent on this educationally fruitless endeavour? What is the return on it? How does it effect education? Suggesting that post-secondary education should cost what it currently does is insane. Private institutions can do whatever they please, in my opinion, but the state schools need to get back to their roots. That is: intellectual pursuits, not physical ones. |
This logic is running rampant right now and is a major player not in the economic collapse, but our inability to convince our governments to deal with economic collapse. When the answer to "Are we spending enough on education?" is simply hard-coded to "No", you get very stupid budget behaviors.
In point of fact, there must be a point where we are spending enough on education, enough on police, enough on health care, enough on welfare, enough on anything. There must even come a point where we are spending enough on educating the disadvantaged, enough on health care for the elderly, enough on programs for poor children. Because the alternative is, frankly, absurd... yet that is where we've gotten to, politically.