Cutting the Poor out of Higher Education, Who Loses?

Cutting the Poor Out of Higher Education, Who Loses?, 2/22/14 My dad made $100 per week from about 1951 to 1968 being a automobile mechanic (Son of an Automobile Mechanic).  It was very good pay in 1951, it was below poverty level in 1968.  And yet, in 1967 my dad was able to pay college tuition for me for my first semester at the Texas Western College, now UTEP.  It cost the family nearly two weeks of his salary.  In contrast, my oldest daughter has about $100, 000 in school loans and is in a field that pays about half of what I earned in my early years as an engineer adjusted for inflation.  And, I can assure you it cost more than two weeks of an engineer’s salary for much of her education. (She did have the Hope Scholarship in SC that gives free college education to anyone maintaining a B average in high school.)

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Our nation now has about a trillion dollars in school loan debt, or a little more debt than Apple Inc. has cash, mostly in foreign country banks - but that is another blog.  Students rightly are starting to push back against this debt and considering not getting an education or delaying it.  To bad for them you say.  Yes, but too bad for us too.

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Our nation is facing a huge shortage of engineers, scientists, and other highly skilled workers as our place as the leading economic power in the world plumets downward.  We may still be in place where we can respond effectively, but we obviously lack the will.

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It is simply about priorities and delayed gratification (investing in our future). What expenditures are we willing to cut to be able to invest in our nations future. The answer is apparently nothing.  We are not willing to touch social security, medicare, military, stupid drug laws that fill our prisons, or anything else.  Our prognosis is simple: continue our decline into a third world status.  At some point, like Rome, we will not even be able to support our mighty army that attempts to force its view of right and wrong upon the world. Ironically,  our military failures, the harbinger of our social failures, are beginning in the same geographic region that destroyed the mighty Roman army.

Plan B: Gary Johnson versus status quo with the Democrats or Republicans. Or do you have another Plan B?