Recently, when hearing talk of next school year, an unfortunate yet pleasant phrase keeps popping into my head: “Not my problem.” It’s that time of the year again, when the seniors start counting the days. Everyone looks forward to the end of school: For freshman it’s that much closer to studying abroad, for sophomores, it’s their ticket home, for juniors, it’s the beginning of the end. But as a senior, there is a special (and dangerous) kind of anticipation to the closing of that final semester.
Obviously, I don’t want to mentally check out when I still have work to do, but that’s of a minor concern. What, upon further study, is a worse problem is that it’s now, as we finish our schooling, that we stop thinking about education.
Call it the Indiana Jones principle. We love when Indy gets out under the quickly closing trap door, especially when he adds the extra flair of grabbing his hat out at the last second. However, little do we think about what remains on the other side of that door. When I graduate from college, it will be far too easy to turn my back on the closed door and go on my way. But there are still people on the other side, for whom education, its availability and rising costs, are still very much an issue.
I graduated from high school in 2008 and washed my hands of everything to do with it. But in the year that the “Great Recession” hit, as I moved on, public education took a huge blow from finances. It wasn’t until recently that I began to think about how my former school district began to crumble after I left. Teaching staff cut, more students to a class, whole subjects being cut, all among myriad problems that presented themselves in the new cash-strapped world of budget cuts. My high school cut all advanced classes and all underperforming classes, meaning that any given subject could have students ranging from village idiot to super genius. Teachers are pulling their hair out trying to figure out how to effectively teach kids over that range of intelligence and academic abilties.
Likewise, leaving Pepperdine might lead me to shrug off issues on the horizon with a “not my problem anymore,” but I fear it will soon become all of our problems. Tuition is going up by 7 percent and is unlikely to stop there. The cost of a college education is going up and the aid to help is going down. The CalGrants budget was nearly cut by $300 million but survived after protests from students and teachers — a lucky break to be sure, but not one that I think will be replicable multiple times over when these kind of cuts come up time and time again.
I fear that education, at all levels, has become the go-to area of sacrifice for weathering the financial storm and that over time, the most significant impact of these times of economic uncertainty will be our disinvestment in it. Founders Thomas Jefferson and James Madison insisted that an educated populace was key to the very organizational function of this country. Madison once wrote, “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce, or a tragedy, or perhaps both.” Similarly Jefferson said, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Jefferson even founded the University of Virginia, and Madison took over when he died.
In a world where even those with college degrees are chronically under-employed, life will only get more difficult for those who haven’t the means to attain a university degree. The old economic model where people could be self-sufficient without higher education has died. Unless we want the American dream to die with it, something must change.
Be grateful for your education, and if a time ever comes that you have the opportunity, be prepared to defend it, both for yourself and for those who would find themselves unable to enjoy the same opportunities you did.
