Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg wants to create a digital library of free course materials for California college students.I'm currently reading Change.edu, and the insights in that book regarding the goals, and the costs, of higher education are remarkable. I recommend it wholeheartedly. This, from the "Book Description" on the linked Amazon page:
The proposal, unveiled earlier this month, is bound to be popular with students grappling with rising tuition and fees at California's public colleges and universities.
While low-income students can’t find a spot in their local community colleges for lack of funding, public four-year universities are spending staggering sums on luxurious residence halls, ever-bigger football stadiums, and obscure research institutes. We have cosseted our most advantaged students even as we deny access to the working adults who urgently need higher education to advance their careers and our economy. In Change.edu: Rebooting for the New Talent Economy, Andrew S. Rosen clearly and entertainingly details how far the American higher education system has strayed from the goals of access, quality, affordability, and accountability that should characterize our system, and offers a prescription to restore American educational pre-eminence.You see, it's not that I think today's college students should sit idly by and pay whatever the universities see fit to charge. It's just that, having accepted the cost upon admission, they cannot then protest and raise hell and ask me, the taxpayer, to pay that cost for them. They chose that option; perhaps they should have read Change.edu and explored less costly options.
If you choose the resort lifestyle, don't expect me to pay for it. And if you choose the resort lifestyle whilst getting a bachelor's degree in "communications" or in Neo-classical Polish Music and Dance or in psychology or in Aggrieved Victim Studies, definitely don't expect me to pay for it.
In Texas there's a fee imposed on students who take longer than four years to graduate. That automatically penalizes those kids working their way through school for no good purpose. My own kids graduated in five years with high GPA's, but because of our family finances, they had to work full time to pay for rent and tuition. In the meantime, when my daughter was an RA, many of the students who were full ride athletes or financial need students who got everything paid for had to be told to go to class and some of them were later kicked out for disrupting classes. I think if you work for something, like a degree, you value it. But if it's just given to you then it simply isn't valued. Sweat equity would change that. There should never be a scholarship given without expectation of some type of work in return.
ReplyDelete