Starting after the Civil War, step by step America created a university system, including private and public colleges, that offered unheard of opportunities for an upwardly mobile America. The words are still thrilling .. GI Bill, Land Grant Universities, Pell Grants, National Merit Awards …. Today, America’s colleges are ranked #1 world wide. That system is in crisis.
High school students enter college needing massive amounts of remedial education. Tuition now leaves students with debts they may never be able to repay. On the right, the Chair of the Univ of Texas Regents can not see why public universities could not make do with Chevies rather than Cadillacs. While college football teams make billions of dollars for the NCAA, 
bright but underprivileged scholars are out of luck. On the right and the left, state budgets failures are being financed by cutting at the meat of public education. In our own , supposedly progressive state, democratic legislators want to to encourage kids to use a dubious private online university at a higher tuition than Washington’s highly ranked community colleges. The main thing this university offers? Students get degrees not for excellence but for something called “competence.”
Equality at the price of quality is no bargain!
The Higher Education Group attempts to address this crisis by breaching the ivy covered wall separating town and gown. Our first goal is to bring Seattle’s citizens and our legislative representatives together with faculty and staff to promote the greatest of American freedoms .. opportunity for all.
Links: The-Ave.US