Budget cuts on education in california - Research Paper Example

Budget cuts on education in California" Original Now for those who object that the cuts for California school is not as bad as believed, they are misinformed. In the 2009-2010 fiscal year the University of California received $813 million less, California State received $625 million less and Community colleges received $812 million less than in the 2007-2008 fiscal year. Now these are significant figures that should cause major alert. These will have adverse affects of decreased transfer rates, increased time to maintaining a degree, increased levels of student debt, decline in the quality of education, and many others.

Now one might ask why this would be caused. Budgets cuts are affecting students the most. They are paying for less and because of the cuts campuses are stretching their resources. As the state continues to reduce funding levels, the system will most likely continue to raise fees for the operational costs of the schools. (Newell) The combination of rising unemployment, declining consumer spending, declining asset values, and foreclosures has led to declining state revenues. And the number of people in poverty is growing, adding costs to state budgets for programs such as Medicaid and social services.

Education is by far the largest component of state budgets. Some 46 percent of all state general fund expenditures is devoted to elementary, secondary, and higher education.(Johnson) According to Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, California is reducing funds towards K-12 education as well as reducing the length of the school year. Doing this is thought to lower the misfortunes of the recession, as well as giving us a kick start in improving our debt. Now this is an argument for why cutting school will be beneficial to the state of California.

Unfortunately, what also goes along cutting education is the money given to students who are unable to fully pay tuition. Therefore, the state of California has also decided to cut grants which in turn will lower the chances of many intelligent individuals who suffer from poverty to enroll in a well known University. Both of Californias public college systems raised their fees recently. California State University trustees approved a 5 percent increase for next semester, and University of California regents passed an 8 percent increase for fall 2011.

Those hikes are on top of repeated increases over the past few years (Guerra). With all these cuts and rising tuition this will cause a major downfall in the uprising of many intelligent individuals. California will fall back on education and this will lead to many young people to be discouraged from obtaining higher education and they will not be able to obtain high paying jobs. Government agencies in California cut around 37,000 workers, with this shows the fact that jobs are becoming harder to find and even harder to keep.

So the obtaining jobs is now harder than ever, many highly qualified people are settling for less because the competition is so rough. Now with cuts on education this will cause only the ones that can afford education a higher chance of obtaining these well paying jobs. (Samuels)ObjectionIt should be recalled that the economic recession across USA was the result of failure of sub-prime property mortgage scheme that led to liquidity crises and credit crunch. The financial institutions and property businesses were among the actual victims of this turmoil, which subsequently covered entire USA and led to steep decline in aggregate consumption and production.

The deindustrialization, negative GDP growth rate and economic contraction declined government revenues due to collection of fewer taxes. In turn, government authorities have cut down their spending on education sector across California that, according to some critics, has adversely impacted universities and colleges as a whole (McKinley, 2010).However, I will not agree with the above mentioned arguments raised against the budget cuts and subsequent adverse impacts on educational sector because government aides, grants and financial support provided to University of California, California State and Community colleges is not more than 15 - 30% of total expenditures of educational institutions.

For instance, government has not brought the educational budget to zero neither has taken back 100% of what it offers to institutions to meet expenses and operational costs. Hence, it should be pointed out that most of the universities, high schools and colleges largely depend on their own resources to generate funds. Even, these universities and colleges are strong enough that they provide education to thousands at a time as well as provide jobs to students during their academic life. As a result, when decrease in educational budgets reduce the income from grants, the educational institutions finance the remainder from no more than 3 – 8% increase in annual fees that should be considered as affordable for students.

However, it is worthwhile to mention that there are a quite a few institutions that rely heavily on state grants; therefore, they could be affected negatively but most would survive even in challenging external environment (Rivera et al, 2010). For instance, it is a myth that only students are affected from recession and subsequent rise in unemployment. Rather, the truth is that a large number of unemployed are professional workers who were previously working full – time for large domestic and supranational companies.

Students (still studying) mostly do part – time or temporary jobs that are still retained; hence, they are not adversely affected to a great extent from present unemployment. Also, they have option to apply for unemployment allowances offered by government so there is greater probability they could finance their annual fees (from earnings after work plus personal savings). In conclusion short, most of the students (80 – 85%) could assimilate these temporary shocks, while some may take periodic leaves from campuses and others could benefit from scholarships and financial support from institutions (Craig, 2010).

References:McKinley, Jesse “California Students Protest Education Cuts” New York Times, March 4, 2010http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/education/05protests.html Craig, Elise “California’s education budget crisis: The story so far” Oakland North, March 3, 2010 http://oaklandnorth.net/2010/03/03/california-education-budget-the-story-so-far/Chea, Terence “Will budget cuts cripple California colleges?” USA Today, August 5, 2009 http://www.usatoday.com/news/education/2009-08-05-california-colleges_N.

htm Rivera, Carla, Nicole Cruz and Larry Gordon “Thousands protest California education cuts” Los Angeles Times, March 05, 2010 http://articles.latimes.com/2010/mar/05/local/la-me-protests5-2010mar05