With the last worldwide and huge economic crisis, reforms have been taken. One of the most alarming ones is the budget cut in universities. Unfortunately governments haven’t found other ways to close state budget gap than depriving universities from important found. A recent article even indicated that UC and Cal State would probably been forced to reduce enrollment by 27,000 over the following years!! But the damages are not done yet since to survive the UC would have to rely heavily on student fees. Apparently, fees in UCs could reach the amount of $18,000. As explained in the UC study, “ the university becomes dependent on high student fees”. So because of that crisis, students are going to meet difficulties… is that normal? I mean it’s even going to be complicated to enroll! Students will have to pay even more than what they are paying now!! What is hard is that future generations are loosing opportunities of career and education because governments haven’t found other solutions…
These unfair consequences have been felt at SMC since the amount of classes proposed has decreased. Emails have been sent explaining that because of the budget cut fewer classes were going to be proposed during the winter semester. The price per unit has also increased. Another problem is that because of the economic crisis, numerous students couldn’t afford the new prices of the UCs , so they moved to community college. Consequently, SMC is overcrowded and finding open classes turns out to become a real problem. This is just an example, but unfortunately this problem occurs everywhere, and students can’t do anything.
However, one good point in all of that, is that the governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared that the government can no longer afford to cut higher education. He even added that never again a greater percentage of the state’s money would be spent on prisons than on higher education. We will see what future holds, but hopefully universities’ budget will recover changing students’lives…
