I found this version of the Associated Press article, Obama ‘putting colleges on notice’ on high tuition, to demonstrate to you what I heard on the CBS Evening News.
The article starts off with a summary of what the President said.
President Barack Obama fired a warning at the nation’s colleges and universities on Friday, threatening to strip their federal aid if they “jack up tuition” every year and to give the money instead to schools showing restraint and value.
In the article I found a rebuttal that I did not hear on the CBS Evening news. This agrees with my immediate thoughts when I heard the President’s words.
University of Washington President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work. Young said the total cost to educate college students in Washington state, which is paid for by both tuition and state government dollars, has actually gone down because of efficiencies on campus. While universities are tightening costs, the state is cutting their subsidies and authorizing tuition increases to make up for the loss.
“They really should know better,” Young said. “This really is political theater of the worst sort.”
The last thing we need is for President Obama to be out selling the Republican propaganda that it is elitist college administrators jacking up the price of a college education. In fact, Obama should be selling the idea that the efforts to reduce the deficit in the middle of a recession is cutting the funding for colleges and universities. It is this behavior promoted by Republicans that is putting the onus on the students to pay the rising tuition costs.
Where other countries in the world, including some of the developing countries that are eating our lunch in the competition for manufacturing jobs, are paying most if not all the costs for higher education, the United States is cutting government support for higher education.
It is unconscionable for the President to be selling the regressive idea that the government’s cutting support for higher education is a wise policy to save the government some money. This is an idiotic policy to turn The United States into a third world country.