Column: On tuition and protests
We as a society have a very important decision to make.
As the economy remains weak and the perennial California budget crisis drags on, the subject of cuts to education becomes very touchy. With the $500 million cut to the UC system already finalized, the only question for us students is whether that number will grow or not, as Republicans and Democrats in the capital wrestle over the enormous budget deficit and the possibility of new taxes.
The question for our society is what exactly the educational rights of us young people are. What financial obligations does the government (i.e., the taxpayer) have to the post-secondary student?
Very few would argue that the taxpayer should not be subsidizing our K-12 education system. There may be smarter ways to do it than we use right now, but the basic idea of free, compulsory education for our children is to me an untouchable right and necessity that we have cherished for more than a century.
Similarly, I think few would argue that government-paid education should cover a lifetime of degrees for the education junkies out there. Somewhere in between the two is a magical “line” at which we declare that additional education for one cannot invariably come at the expense of all.
Student protesters at colleges across the state – ours included – have not shied away from making the issue as dramatic as possible. Spokespeople have denounced the “privatization of our universities” and the “suffering” that “the system” creates, leading to the current “struggles.” There have even been comparisons made to the marches and riots for freedom from dictators in the Middle East.
The answer to this question, I must admit, is something of an arbitrary, philosophical one. To say that we should fully subsidize education through the age of 18 (the approximate high school graduation age) but not spend much money beyond that would likely produce a flurry of questions from my 10-year-old niece. What about 18 and two months? How about 18 and five weeks? No, no, 18 and 42 seconds?
My answer to the above central question, then, relies instead on a quote from a famous author of the American Revolution. “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value,” Thomas Paine wrote in 1776.
Speaking to the “dearness” of my own education, when I graduated high school in 2002, I deferred admission to UC Davis for a full year in order to work full time at a local grocery store and save up money. I bagged groceries, gathered carts, stocked shelves and ran around fetching things. Sometimes I’d clean bathrooms and clear up after night crew for the 3 a.m. to noon utility clerk shift.
Most of those mornings, somewhere around 5 a.m., sick of the endless mess and the smell of the floor-cleaning machines, without a moment of sleep to survive on, I’d go postal on some poor hapless cardboard box that tripped me. Usually it seemed to be in the toilet paper aisle, which was appropriate given how crappy that shift was.
Yet in that year I managed to save $13,000 and about 97 percent of my income, earning me the 2003 Great Depression Imitator Award which was made with dust, scraps of wood and empty promises from Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt.
My savings, combined with a very meager living, many loans and a little help from my parents, got me through college semi-independently. My point is not that I had the hardest time paying for college. I know for a fact that, with rapidly increasing tuition and some students who can’t even get partial help from their folks, there are tougher stories out there.
Rather, I am addressing the idea that we young people have such a right to heavily subsidized post-secondary education that we must protest en masse, hold sit-ins and shut down intersections and freeways. If we’re going to wave around our B.A. or B.S. and expect thousands of dollars in additional annual income for the rest of our lives, that piece of paper better have some meaning to it. I know mine sure does.
Obviously, if we can get more help from the state to make the education within the reach of more young people, that is a good thing. But if our state is in a terrible fiscal crisis, and the solution is to raise already high taxes, hurting businesses and job creation and chasing even more rich people (whose tax dollars we desperately need) out of the state, I must part ways with the protesters.
We have a right to pursue a college education. Unfortunately, we do not have a right for it to be cheap.
ROB OLSON will esteem your e-mails dearly at rwolson@ucdavis.edu.