Why we occupy
Mar 6th, 2012 at 10:40 am by susie
This is what students are protesting in California. State schools are supposed to be affordable, and that’s why they’re demanding a dedicated millionaires tax. Will they get it?
Going to school at Harvard University is cheaper than attending a public university in California.
According to the Bay Area News Group, a “family of four — married parents, a high-school senior and a 14-year-old child — making $130,000 a year,” with typical financial aid, would pay around $17,000 for tuition, room and board and other expenses, if their child went to Harvard. However, if their child attended a Cal State, they would pay $24,000. Going to the University of California, Santa Cruz would cost around $33,000; at UC Berkeley would be about $19,500.
Other Ivy League schools including Yale University and Princeton University offer similar financial scenarios.
“It does sort of put you in an awkward spot,” Dean Kulju, financial-aid director of the 400,000-student Cal State system, said. Cal State has doubled their tuition since 2007, the Bay Area News Group reported.California’s public universities lost more than a $1 billion in support from the state in a round of 2011-12 cuts. Gov. Jerry Brown (D) announced in December, another $300 million would unexpectedly be cut from higher education because revenues were coming in below projections.
Since 2009, public universities in the state have lost $2 billion and community colleges have had $695 million cut from their budgets.
According to the Government Accountability Office, both public universities have increasingly relied on tuition for funding as states have dropped support.Over the past three years, students have been holding protests in California against tuition hikes that have been as high as 32 percent in some cases.
I was hoping that higher eduction would teach people not to act like criminals when expressing dissent. I mean, because somebody shattered that window, I suddenly agreed with the points the protestors were making. The police seemed to be acting very reasonably in the footage, in any case.
Steven, are you aware that the police and other government entities assign provocateurs to infiltrate protest movements and shatter windows, metaphorically speaking?
In NYC, it is the cops that are acting like criminals, blatantly ignoring court orders related to Occupy Wall Street, and inflicting violence on non-violent protesters. And the Oakland cops almost killed an Iraq war vet.