Thursday, April 30, 2009

Middle class families are feeling the squeeze. It is a social good, more important than good roads, and the State should pay for it. End of story.


Strib online, April 29, 2009, reports:

Student debt is soaring -- it has risen 157 percent in the state over the past decade -- as college costs advance at a rate far exceeding family income. Undergraduate tuition at the University of Minnesota, for example, has doubled this decade.

Next fall, for the first time in the University of Minnesota's history, students will shoulder more of the university's budget than the state will. As student borrowing swells, and state aid to campuses contracts, middle-class families are feeling the squeeze most.


GET THAT - IT COULD NOT BE MADE MORE EXPLICIT - STRIB CONTINUING -

That is prompting tough new questions about how colleges and universities are managing their budgets. Rising tuition costs and record student debt also are leading many American families to conclude that a college education is slipping out of reach -- even as they admit it's more essential than ever.

"Nothing is too shocking in terms of student loans," said Paul Raymond, a Lutheran Social Service of Minnesota financial counselor who advises students at the U. "It's not a surprise to have 60-plus thousand dollars in [student] loans."


Pawlenty and his squeezing the future skilled labor pool, the pool of educated workers needed for our State's young people to fill jobs in order for us to capably meet needs in Minnesota for the teaching of new K-12 generations and for a skilled high tech employment pool to keep the economic engine humming, eating the seed corn that way, is plainly reprehensible.

The man should hide his face in shame.

Those in the legislature not supporting scholar well-being are equally repugnant.

Do the right thing, and do it now. Neither this state nor the nation can make it by relying on ever greater numbers of nonimmigrant temporary visa workers, as nurses, as power engineers, as professors in our colleges. We should be making it easier for our college-age children to learn and earn in Minnesota, to stay here and contribute to the entire social well-being of state and nation.

Instead, roadblocks are thrown in the way of our best and brightest. Except for children of the rich, we are putting all the rest of us in peril.

It is stupid and it will lead to economic decline as a certainty, if not to a massive economic failure and ruin with the Chinese and Indian nations gaining preeminence at our expense, and the US risking being a has-been used-to-be great nation.

See, here, here, here and here for a vignette view from earlier in the decade of a troubling current situation that can only worsen, the worse we treat our native-born young scholars.

I am not saying discriminate against foreign talent, rather, foster and don't impede the growth of this nation's young people into skills that they and our society will need, to maintain ourselves as a prosperous, good place to live and raise family.