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One of the expected offshoots of the Occupy movement that we’re already seeing are the protests on college campuses. Again, look to history. From the direct antecedent of the occupation of People’s Park in Berkeley to the more generalized scores of campus protests in the 1960s and 1970s, there’s a rich tradition of college students, typically the class of Americans with the most leisure time and the least obligations and responsibilities, engaging in dissent and protest.
If there is a difference here, it’s that increasingly, students are protesting for their right to afford a college education. As Zaid Jilani reminds us, it wasn’t so long ago that a college education at a well-recognized public university was free in the state of California. This goes all the way into the 1960s. But now, the cost of education is skyrocketing just as national wealth is collapsing from the popping of the housing bubble.
And this is not only true in California. The next-wave Occupy Wall Street protest today is specifically focused on the lack of affordability for higher education, which led Baruch College in New York City to cancel afternoon classes. In both New York and California today, protests coincide with state Board of Regents or city Board of Trustees hearings which could recommend additional tuition hikes.
An early leader in the Occupy movement’s list of grievances was the crushing burden of student loans. Those student loans have only become bloated and unaffordable in this era of tuition increases, forcing students who want to pursue higher education to borrow more money. The soaring cost of public education is pricing college out of reach for a large class of people, which depresses their potential for upward mobility. The 99% cannot ascend without the type of education being denied to them, as the 1% and the corporations they inhabit evade paying their fair share in taxes.
This is going to be a continuing feature of Occupy movement protests over the next several months; how could it not be? The crisis in higher education is part and parcel with the two-tiered country that has been molded over the past several decades.
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Our ruling class would like us to be ignorant and obedient, like serfs. Of course within the education establishment there is far too much top heavy bureaucracy, and insistence on uniformity, ideology, and propaganda being foisted onto students at all levels. Money should go to the states to craft a simpler, more effective educational program but then it would fall victim to local stupidity, so really my choice is home schooling to keep kids free from idiocy and propaganda. All education seems to be today is fascist indoctrination.
Merit Scholarships: Rob from the Poor, Give to the Rich?
One of the most disgusting aspects of the `structural unemployment’ meme circulating in the MSM is that the unemployment rate for college graduates that is often reported is the rate among all people with college degrees, not that among the students who graduated recently. It’s funny how the pundit class is fixated on the top marginal tax rates for corporations or 1%ers, but not the marginal unemployment rate for recent college grads.
“Hundreds of students and faculty members temporarily shut down a University of California Board of Regents meeting being held simultaneously today at campuses in San Francisco, Davis, Merced and Los Angeles by standing in the conference rooms and chanting slogans so loudly the regents could no longer conduct business.”
Interesting that the UC Berkeley Police Officers Association released this statement before the regents’ meeting began: “It was not our decision to engage campus protesters. We are now faced with ‘managing’ the results of years of poor budget planning.”
LINK.