Thank you for your editorial on Monday April 2 entitled “Our View: Time for legislators to fix the university funding gap.”
This issue is critically important to ASU students and it should be important to all Arizona taxpayers. ASU produces more than half of this state’s public higher education degrees and reports from the Arizona Board of Regents (ABOR) show that graduates of ASU earn more money and thus pay more in taxes than graduates of our other two institutions. That ASU is not receiving our tax dollars back in an equitable manner is unacceptable.
It is also unacceptable that it was just last year that our legislators directed ABOR to create a plan to fix this disparity but now, those same legislators are ignoring the report and subsequent budget requests to fix this systemic issue. The plan, that was agreed upon by the university presidents, elected student leaders, and ABOR, calls for a five-year phasing in of $60 million to ASU and $15 million to NAU which still equates to less than 20 percent of the over $400 million in cuts the universities have suffered in the past three years.
It is time for our legislators to finish what they started and invest more in higher education. The students of ASU ask you to support us by contacting your legislators and asking them to include the disparity funding fix in the fiscal year 2013 budget.
Rhian Stotts
VP of External Affairs, Graduate and Professional Student Association, ASU
chatmandu002 posted at 10:17 am on Fri, Apr 13, 2012.
Gee, the VP of ASU asking for more money. Go figure....
sockratties posted at 11:19 pm on Fri, Apr 13, 2012.
Instead of just dumping more money into an institution that continually takes all it can get then asks for more, let's target subjects and disciplines that are needed in the upcoming decades. Regardless of which campuses the funds go to lets make sure the programs support STEM; science, technology, engineering and math. We can fill in the general arts, music, physical education and humanities stuff once we catch up with the rest of the world in the fields of study that will make us once again competitive in the information age of the coming generations.
In_God_We_Trust posted at 5:44 pm on Thu, Apr 19, 2012.
I agree sockrattle, but how will the 99% get their hippy degrees if we don't concentrate on music appreciation and sociology courses that produce people who wont work or become social welfare workers. Social welfare work is a booming profession as a larger percentage of Americans become dependent on the govment to pay their way. Actually, we need to start at the elementary level so that students already know how to spell and add and subtract before entering college. Our education system is a failure starting at the basic level all the way to the university level. When I was a kid my parents looked at my schooling as if it were my job, and I studied long after school was adjourned for the day. Today's children spend more time playing video games and watching TV than studying for their future and America's future. You know K-12 children spend around 180 days per year in school? Is that preparing for their future? For most of them it doesn't even qualify them to take college level classes.
In_God_We_Trust posted at 5:48 pm on Thu, Apr 19, 2012.
My parents considered a B as average and a C as a failure. I went to summer school for getting a C. When I hit the university I was prepared for to succeed.