Repeated cuts in Michigan’s education funding appalling

I’m appalled that the state legislature continues to cut funding for higher education year after year.  We all know the state’s economy has seen better days, but repeated cuts have put higher education funding in jeopardy.

In the past decade, the cost of a college education has increased almost exponentially. While the state used to provide nearly 70 percent support for universities, now students are responsible for funding that same amount through our tuition dollars. A degree is an essential building block to starting a successful career. How can our legislators justify the continued decrease of state appropriations to higher education, especially in this economy?

Obviously, our elected officials in Lansing understand the importance of a higher education to the economic success of families, and of our state. Though funding to public universities seems to be dwindling, the state is still pumping its allotment of federal dollars into the No Worker Left Behind program. That’s simply unfair to us college students. They must realize that the key to fixing our broken economy is education.

The Michigan Promise is a sore topic for students across our state.  I would argue that legislators cannot simply take the money promised for this fund and use it elsewhere, leaving none for students.

As individual students, and a university collectively, we must tell our representatives and senators that we are Michigan’s strongest hope of saving this state from its current recession.  I think that we students must come together to lobby our legislators directly in Lansing. We have to get up close and personal, to tell them our stories and how these cuts affect us. Through a new WSA initiative, WMU’s Student Lobby Day in Lansing, we have the opportunity to put faces with names and show our elected officials that we will not become statistics — that higher education funding matters.
Andrew Ladd

WMU junior

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=14842

Posted by heraldstaff on Feb 14 2010. Filed under Letters to the Editor, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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