If there was ever a time to be a student at USC, it looks like it’s now, as California students swapped out their pens for picket signs yesterday when the University of California Board of Regents approved a 32 percent tuition hike for the next two years.
We know California is basically in economic shambles right now, but this increase is only going to further send the state financially spiraling down while simultaneously casting out its students to make up for the deficit.
What happens when students cannot afford to return, or those that do all try to secure loans at once? In the long run, less students will be able to pay for the tuition — which is one of the largest in the country — meaning many less people will be able to fill the jobs that pour more money into the economy.
We encourage the regents to consider alternative plans over pushing the burden onto their students and those students’ families. Why not trim off some of these major colleges out of the system and make them private instead? Why not cut other corners and make the necessary cutbacks to keep students economically afloat and in class?
When the hike was announced, hoards of students protested on UCLA’s campus. It’s refreshing to see students care about the matters of their university, even if it is about their own bank accounts.
We are lucky to attend a university where we are not forced to face the kind of financial burden our friends on the West Coast are dealing with now. But it does leave us something to think about. On a campus with a reputation for its apathetic students, these protesting students should be an inspiration.
So while we should be grateful for our university and the measures our administration has taken to keep the burden off of us, we should also remember it’s our responsibility to speak up when we aren’t happy.
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Enter a horde of illegal immigrants. The whole state is in economic shambles. Many, many emergency rooms have been flooded with illegals using them as clinics and this has simply overwhelmed the system, forcing them to close for lack of adequate funding to remain open. Gang related crime has escalated to the point that many areas of the state are unsafe and the price of policing has spiked as a result. Eleven percent of the prison inmates in California prisons are illegals, costing the state almost $1 Billion yearly.
It is estimated that the cost of illegal aliens to the education system is $ 4 Billion. An excellent article outlining the above figures and detailing more disastrous effects being felt by California as a result of illegal immigrants can be seen in a Feb. 2, 2009 article in The Los Angeles Times by George Skelton.