In 107 days, the federal government spent as much money on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as it did on education. Granted, a large share of education funding comes from state and local sources, but if the Republicans have their way, even less money will go towards education.
To put it simply, the funding for education is being assaulted on all fronts. Just last week, Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky proposed a sweeping $500 billion reduction in federal spending. Although I thoroughly commend the senator for proposing any kind of action, the truth is his cuts are overwhelmingly from smaller “discretionary” portions of the budget. He proposed an 83 percent reduction in the Department of Education. Paul claimed that department’s funding increased 80 percent since 2001. In his proposal, he also said that military spending rose 120 percent during the same period or by an astounding 67 percent if the costs of the two wars are not included. Yet the department would receive only a miniscule 6.5 percent reduction. Paul’s rationale for this large disparity in cuts was that the “state and local governments, parents and teachers are far better equipped to meet the needs of their students than this red-tape-laden department, which benefits teachers unions more than pupils.”
Paul’s proposal would make a lot of sense if the state and local municipalities were indeed “better equipped” to meet their students’ needs. The reality is that they simply are not; they are in their worst fiscal shape of the last 70 years. As the Recovery Act money begins to stop coming in, 44 states and D.C. are facing budget shortfalls totaling $125 billion for the 2012 fiscal year, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Naturally, the first funding the states cut is for education. Thirty-four states have imposed cuts on K-12 education, and 43 states have made cuts in funding for higher education. As a student at the University of Florida, you may have seen this firsthand, as tuition increased 15 percent during the 2009-2010 year and went up another 15 percent this year. Additionally, our Bright Futures scholarships have been capped to a certain dollar amount per credit hour. The combination of these two effects has slammed less privileged students and those without prepaid college funds immensely. It’s clear through the numbers that Paul and his party are off the mark when it comes to reality. Any additional cuts in the education budget effectively would kill the already anemic state of higher education in this country.
It’s obvious, however, what Paul and his colleagues do value: the mammoth amount of money directed toward defense spending. I can understand that national defense is one of the top priorities of the federal government. However, I fail to see how Paul ignored the Pentagon’s own proposal to shed $100 billion in favor of a more muted cut of $47 billion.
Maybe the lesson to be learned is that people who receive the funding for higher education tend to vote at levels significantly less than those of other demographics. This creates a situation where the best and brightest in America are also the ones who have the fewest opportunities to attain a higher education and become a member of the highly skilled workforce starved for doctors, nurses, teachers and engineers.
Chad Mohammed is a second-year chemical engineering student. His column appears on Thursdays.
