Midwestern Map- Wikimedia Commons

The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act did send a huge amount of much-needed money to worthy causes throughout our country, and it is helping. The dire situation that education finds itself in is one that demands personnel cuts to stave off complete collapse. States 2009 Survey by the American Association of School Administrators,

“While a minority of respondents have been able to save core subject teaching positions, a slight
majority say that are using or plan to use ARRA dollars to save personnel positions overall, following
one of the major goals of the stimulus dollars. Outside of shoring up staff, school districts are investing
their ARRA funds in one‐time costs.”

The site defines these one-time costs as personnel training and classroom training and supplies. Schools are doing what they can to save their educators and administrators. But there’s no guarantee that the teachers that are being rehired with ARRA money won’t be laid off again if the economy continues to crumble.

Another Missouri lawmaker, Gov. Haley Barbour is “ordering budget cuts in many state programs, including public education, to cut state spending by $171.9 million. He said despite cuts educations will still receive more money than they had in the past,” according to CBS News.

Skeptics of Nixon’s tuition freeze plan want to know where the money that would be coming from raised tuitions will now be found. As the plan hasn’t undergone final approval from the state, Nixon only has suggestions as of now. The Southeast Missourian has cited his belief in academic flexibility, more rigorous college acceptance guidelines, and a new emphasis on attainable e-learning as a way of saving money.

It is true that Missouri’s debt is not as monumental as ours. Does that mean that California shouldn’t make an effort? Where is our commitment to reform? Raising tuition is not the only answer. Our money shouldn’t be the only thing working for our universities. Don’t we deserve some return on our educational investment?

Meanwhile, the California State Universities are seeing first-hand what happens when administrators halt our scheduled fee hike. This quarter, I took a priority registration (all Cal Poly students have three to spread out over their college career) in order to ensure I got the major courses I needed. Even with this precaution, the courses I needed were almost immediately filled. I’m not alone in my outrage. Here, CSU Fresno students speak on registration frustration
.

Students and faculty are suffering at the hands of our state deficit. For those of us who can still afford to get there, the college degrees we walk with at the end of these next few years will be the product of fewer days spent in more homogenous classrooms.

A blog written by California Faculty Association member Enrique Ochoa states,

In an October 2, 2009 memo to CSU chief administrators, Executive Vice Chancellor Benjamin Quillan calls for campuses to create plans to reduce their budgets not by “tinkering with reductions at the margins” but by changing “radically business processes and service delivery systems so that personnel costs and other expenditures can be reduced significantly on an ongoing basis.” Quillan urges campuses “to work together to reduce unnecessary duplications.”

Building on this sentiment, CSU Stanislaus president Shirvani recently called for abandoning the historic mission of the CSU of educating all qualified students and instead has redefined a university in California as a privilege not a right. He also called for raising student fees, increasing class sizes, and reducing faculty involvement in governance.

While it is true that Shirvani does describe the attitude of many college students as one of entitlement, he does it within a global conversation. He states that

“As soon as the word “privilege” enters the conversation, people bring up the subject of access, with the implication that if something is a privilege, only privileged people will enjoy it. But in America, access to higher education is unparalleled. No other country has so many fully accredited colleges or has provided such widespread access to student financial aid.”

This is true, and his calls for reform are realistic. Unfortunately, they require work and sacrifice. We may have to increase class size. Isn’t that better that than cutting classes altogether? Universities may have to learn to play to their strengths, according to Shirvani. He continues, writing that professors may be asked to participate less in committee work and focus more of their time to teaching you.

I should make it clear that I rarely support bureaucracy of any kind, but I believe Shirvani has made some excellent points. The confidence/ no confidence vote  in Shirvani is scheduled to be completed Nov. 19.

A Socialist view.

Shirvani’s Official CSU Page.

The Intro to Web-Based Journalism course that I’m keeping this blog for also requires that I read the book “What Would Google Do?” by Jeff Jarvis. Jarvis uses Google as a template for improving businesses of all kinds. In a chapter on how banks could learn from Google, he suggests that microloans (person-to-person loans often for small amounts) might humanize the faceless bureaucracy of modern loans. Websites such as Prosper and Kiva offer fixed interest rates for loan-seekers and background checks for potential investors. Usually these microloans are sought by aspiring business owners in developing countries, but can be used by anyone for any kind of cause. After posting a request for a loan, you just have to hope that a benevolent investor will find the cause worthy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ramonk/

Jarvis states that while 16.6% of subprime (high-risk) loans have defaulted, over 98.1% of microloans on Kiva have been repaid. The idea of microfinance isn’t new according to a 2008 New Yorker article. Microfinance has been around since the 1970′s, and doesn’t often enrich the economies of developing countries. The loans being requested rarely create new jobs. Even Jarvis is aware that the system has it’s limits, and doesn’t suggest that it replace banking entirely. He simply thinks that it is a more personal and accessible alternative to the tedious quagmire that applying for a loan from large banks has become.

I’m not suggesting that you pay your entire way through college using microloans, but they could be useful in a situation where you need a small to middling amount of cash, bypassing the bank. Another plus? Microloans have no set lending amount. No matter how tight your budget, you can help others help themselves.

President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 into being on February 17, 2009. The full text of the bill can be found here. In short, the government is giving states up to 800 billion dollars.

A government-created website allows citizens and recipients of the money to track its uses. California, not shockingly, has received the most funds, weighing in at nearly nineteen billion in awarded funds. In my few years in California, I’ve gotten used to seeing our name atop the list of neediest states. This isn’t the only list we top on Recovery.gov’s site. California also has the highest amount of jobs created and saved, with well over a hundred thousand. A recent article in the Reno Gazette-Journal states that of those hundred thousand California jobs saved, sixty-two thousand have been in fields of education.

Of course, in the interest of balanced journalism I should warn readers that not everyone thinks this money will be enough. Lillian Taiz, President of the California Faculty Association, is concerned that this is our only shot at reform. As she states, “If we don’t act now, we will not have the option to rebuild later. Higher education is not something that starts and stops like a faucet; the impact of decisions being made now will be with us for a long time.” Fortunately, Taiz doesn’t believe that all is lost, merely that we need to focus, and focus hard on making these awards work for us. She suggests that we focus the grant money on financial aid (as middle class students are the hardest hit in these trying times), class preservation, laboratory and library updates, classroom repair, and any measures that would increase campus “green”-ness.

Another blog that tracks the woes of the California educational system, Which Way California?, states, “The 10-campus University of California system, for example, has received $716 million in stimulus funds to offset its $1 billion gap. But that money is a temporary fix. A quip circulating among college presidents: The stimulus isn’t a bridge; it’s a short pier.”

Maybe college presidents are just an overly cynical bunch. It does seem far too early in the disbursement and spending of these awards to properly gauge just how much good they will or won’t do. For now, I’m choosing to remain hopeful.

So can you tell me a little bit more about the conference in Fresno? How were the other CSUs reacting to the budget cuts?

Well everyone’s outraged. That wasn’t even really discussed, it’s just assumed now. There are some universities like Cal Poly that are kind of at the ground level stages ,who are still building things up and starting, then there are other CSUs like Fullerton and I think Channel Island and actually Bakersfield that had very good standing Lobby Corps. It was pretty impressive we went through a workshop on how to recruit, what you should be covering, what people you should be looking for, things like that.

And what do you think would make the program more attractive to Cal Poly students? It is an issue that affects everyone, why do you think that people have been so apathetic here and not so in other schools?
I think it’s because of the presence of the lobby corps in other schools and the way that ASI is being run, something we’ve been working on in the Executive Cabinet as a whole is outreach. It’s one of Kelly Griggs three main platform ideas, outreach to students and why are you not caring about this because it’s something so crucial this year. And we’re working to get opinions and to do something with them and we should be producing some pretty awesome events sometime soon to gain interest and so people can voice their concerns and outrage.
Can you tell us some other things that ASI has been working on lately?
We’re just getting the ball rolling right now. A lot of it is training. I didn’t realize that have to retrain everyone every single year, even if they’ve already served on the cabinet. There are three returning members, a mixed bag between the Board of Directors and the University Advisory Boards. We’re all kind of settling into our positions. Actually, just this morning we had our exec cabinet meeting and it really got going and we assigned tasks to a week of events we’re putting on around Thanksgiving break. I can’t really say its what about but you’ll definitely see things around campus. I mean we’re all students so we definitely know what we acknowledge when we’re walking to class and what we don’t, and it’s a changing time so we’re looking for a new way to advertise to students, to reach out and get people to care.
Because I feel, and a lot of people that I’ve talked to about ASI they know it exists and they know it puts on these social events but they don’t know what it does behind the scenes. Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about what ASI has financially and because everyone’s paying for it, all students pay dues for ASI, correct? (A: Yeah.) So what can students expect from their money when it goes to ASI?
That’s mostly ASI events, I think what most of the money goes to is supporting PolyEscapes, the Craft Center, and they’re doing a whole new scope of ASI this year which is Late Night. Now that we have 65,000 residents living on campus 24/7 there’s a new huge demand for things to do on the weekends, starting November 13th. They’re already doing asi flix, brand new fresh movies, new programming, free pizza, anything to keep kids from going down to Hathaway and instead going to the UU, because there’s tremendous resources there that are just not being used so part of our job with exec cab is to get students to know what these resources are that are being provided, and not utilized.
And I recently read an interview with Kelly Griggs in the Mustang Daily where she was talking about how the on-campus police force and how she doesn’t feel it’s a good use of their time to be trying to catch kids walking home drunk from Hathaway, so it’s good to see that she’s actually being proactive and in a lot of my experience with students government there have been a lot of empty promises and I didn’t have much faith in the last election.
I don’t know if you can put this in your paper, but I think this year we’re really taking on the idea of there’s no bullshit here. We’re done, you know? We’ve all been in leadership positions before and we know how annoying it is when you say you’re gonna do all these things and nothing happens. So we’re doing our absolute best to make every meeting count and make every dollar count because we are all strapped with the budget. So yeah, we’re getting creative on how to reach out to the students using the internet and all these different methods of outreach.
Have the budget cuts affected ASI’s budget as well?
Um, not necessarily. I don’t know if I can really comment on that. They showed us a brief PowerPoint on it, I mean numbers did look good as far as this year to last year, we don’t want to be wasting. It is still student money, and we don’t want to be wasting it.
I think just to wrap it up, I just want to talk about how you’re in an interesting position, because you’re both a leader on campus and you’re a student, so you’re seeing what’s happening financially. And even just all the changes we’re going through as a result of all of these budget cuts, but also you have to live them as a student. So can you just explain to me a little bit more how you felt personally affected by these things that are happening? Not even in reference to your ASI experience.
Yeah, as a student I’m really close to my family, I mean my parents are my best friends in the whole world. So whenever there’s a something financially disheartening that’s happening, such as this huge budget crisis, I don’t look at it as “oh, that sucks for my parents,” I take it personally. I think that’s where my passion for these issues comes from. I see my mom really just stressing and she’s usually very calm so that makes me nervous. These are definitely hard times and I don’t see how people can accept this. I don’t see how they could not get involved and want to change this. I mean every time I get overwhelmed or feel like I might want to quit, I just think of my parents working so hard everyday of their lives, because they’re both self-employed so they set their own boundaries. And how could I not fight for them?

As of July 21st, the state reached a budget settlement that cut the university system’s funding by 20%, according to a US News blog. The consequences of this major slash were almost immediately apparent. Professors and university employees were furloughed, subtracting days from their work week to alleviate California’s crushing debt. While some of my professor’s have arranged to take these days on Fridays, when class is out of session, I do have one professor who is canceling six classes during one quarter. I’m not at all suggesting that we simply ignore our state’s dire financial situation, nor am I stating that I am unwilling to pay more for an education that will both benefit me and help California out of its fiscal quagmire. However, I do not personally have any desire to pay for an education that I am not receiving. Had our fees decreased to match the number of hours spent in the classroom, students would have very little cause for complaint. Unfortunately, the money we owe our universities is growing inversely. A September 26th article in the Fresno Bee states that students should expect an additional 10% fee hike in the coming year, over and above the 30% increase already in effect.

Not all California students are taking this news without complaint. On September 24th, students at the historically revolutionary University of California, Berkeley staged a walk-out. The linked video illustrates how the massive crowd chanted and picketed for their educational rights (the walkout was attended by more than 5,000 individuals, according to UC Berkeley’s website statement.) Audio from the walk-out can be found here.

It might be that Cal Poly students don’t share Berkeley’s activist spirit, or that the CSUs already very low tuition leaves more room for increases without wallet hemorrhaging. According to their respective sites, UC fees average $8,100 while CSU fees hover around the $5,000 mark. This gap may still seem large enough to assuage CSU students about the value of their education. But when the 2009 CSU fees are compared to those from 2008, as in this chart, the differences become more pronounced. This years students are paying a difference of roughly $1,500 more in fees for an education whose only changes are class cancellations, professor layoffs, and a pervasive feeling of irritation towards those students who haven’t quite graduated in the traditional four year span.

I understand that the road to economic recovery is not an easy one to travel. I have no simplistic solutions to a very complicated problem, and I will never claim to be an expert on the intricacies of our nation’s monetary plight. I am nothing more than a young student, full of hubris and moral outrage. But it is my sincere belief that higher education, especially at a public university, should never be out of the reach of those who wish to learn. In the coming weeks I hope to explore how these students can reconcile their desire for a degree with the reality of their savings accounts.