Cutting graduate student grants is the last thing the Cal State University should do. Raise tuition, cut classes, layoff lecturers but don’t take grants away from people who are helpless without them. If anything should be subsidized and I believe very little should that thing should be education.
The CSU has raised undergraduate tuition every year I’ve attended Cal State Long Beach and contrary to popular belief they did this to increase access – to allow more people to attend its campuses. Yes, some people – people like me – had to take out extra loans and had to pay more to go school but others benefited from these increases.
For every dollar we paid in tuition increases 33 cents went to university grants. This is exactly why raising tuition is better than cutting grants and better than cutting classes: two things that are both happening next fall.
If the university system raises tuition we’ll pay more, and some students will subsidize others but with hard work we’ll all still graduate. If the system cuts our classes it will take us a little longer to graduate but with the same hard work we’ll all still graduate. But, if the system cuts our grants some people will never graduate, they’ll never reach their potential and as a result our economy will never produce at its full potential.
The CSU has understood this and I believe it continues to. But, under the direction of Gov. Jerry Brown and as tool to manipulate voters into voting for tax increases this November, the CSU is cutting – cutting classes, cutting enrollment and now cutting grants.
If it hurts, our elected officials think, we’ll cough up the money to make it stop. This would make some sense if the CSU were pegged to receive a bulk of Brown’s tax increases but that’s far from the case. Instead, California students are being used as a sacrifice on the altar of government spending and after our class sections CSU graduate students are next up for slaughter. Over $600 million of Brown’s midyear $1 billion dollar budget cut went to education.
The governor slashed the University of California and the CSU by $100 million each, K-12 schools by $327 million and community colleges by $102 million.
On that same day the governor told media at a news conference, “Nemo dat [quod] non habet,” a Latin phrase that means, “no man can give what he does not have,” and he went on to say “the state cannot give what it does not have.”
Although he was quick to evoke a Latin proverb, Brown forgot an important one from his native language: If you teach a man to fish, you’ll feed him for a lifetime.
Public education is the state’s equivalent to teaching its population how to fish. An educated populace will work for itself; it will not rely on its government. An uneducated populace will be dependent on its government and rely on the work of others.
Cut entitlements, cut public pensions, limit the size and scope of our government but don’t take our education away. Don’t take the only opportunity we have to be self-reliant. The only opportunity we have not be reliant on you.
Zien Halwani is a senior economics and philosophy double major and the editor in chief of the Daily 49er.
