At our recent budget meeting with the Chancellor, I learned some startling facts about the state of finances at the university, and it has nothing to do with the administration hiding money. We at SIU are considered a public university, but that is slowly becoming a misnomer. According to the university budget, student tuition gives the university more money than state funding–not by a great margin, but it has recently overtaken the state funding. Considering that the state still owes SIU more than 50 million dollars, that makes their stake even less. They have given the university half as much as students have.
However, this is also an illusion, because much of that student tuition is state money, in the form of student loans! Yes, students are borrowing that money which the state might otherwise simply give the university, but that has become the huge debt crisis of our generation, student loan debt. I’m still compiling the numbers, but it looks like almost half of the tuition money is given out as loans, which puts the state, or in this case federal, contribution back in the driver’s seat, in a twisted way. Why doesn’t the government just give it directly to the university? The loan process is a way of putting the burden on individuals instead of the state, and this is creating a crisis.
Some out there will ask, so what? Aren’t the students the ones who benefit? Yes, in the short term, but overall, society benefits, and so do those big corporations and wealthy tax contributors. If we have more dentists, more doctors, more researchers, we find more cures, keep the populace healthy and that benefits everyone. We have more qualified engineers for hire, we have more highly educated individuals to export around the world as experts in various fields, whether to discover oil, lithium or new resources. We can improve agricultural methods, recycling, desalination and so many other problems to benefit the world, if we have an educated populace–and if we give that education to poor or rich, not based on money, but based on the desire to learn, and the ability to perform (the willingness to learn and work hard in class).
Our country used to understand these equations. What happened?
