“If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” Obama said, drawing immediate applause. “Higher education can’t be a luxury — it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.” Although the speech did not offer any additional details about that warning, a document the White House published accompanying the speech said that the president would propose to “shift some federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide good value.”
» via Inside Higher Ed
President Obama doesn’t understand how publicly-funded higher education works. If you take away taxpayer funding, you have to raise tuition because the cost of the materials and resources associated with education increase every year. There is very, very little that college and universities can do about this. This is compounded by our belief that higher ed. is inherently valuable or necessary, even for people who aren’t prepared or don’t want to attend college for whatever reason. So we have to hire more tutors and advisors and instructors to keep class sizes small for students who need extra love, which, of course, costs money.
Or I could just keep my mouth shut and let them move a couple more desks into my half-converted office (former hospital room, for real) for the non-union, part-time, underpaid adjuncts that will undoubtedly be hired to fill in the gaps in this utopian vision of affordable education.
