College affordability is a major issue that parents and students alike grapple with every year. It is also a problem that both President Barack Obama and Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley have said they planned to deal with. Both have championed their “successes” on that front. Reality check, gentlemen. You two haven’t done anything for college affordability and as a result my family and thousands of other families like mine are hurting.
Barack
Obama claims he has kept college affordable for students. Yet according to College Board, college costs
have risen 25 percent since Obama took office.
Obama also considers himself to be a champion of low student loan rates,
a lie the main stream media is happy to press on the American people. The reality is that the extension of the
student loan rate was an act of Congress passed with strong bipartisan support.
Experts
have also debated the ease of getting a federal student loan, another thing
Obama champions on the campaign trail.
And what they say isn’t promising.
In
a Diamondback article dated August 30, 2012, Jim Bach published another random
act of journalism about how the federal loan program hurts students (To me, it
seems as if Bach might be one of maybe three reporters at the Diamondback
capable of such acts). In the article,
Cliff Rossi from the business school here at Maryland explained that easy federal
loans create artificial demand for college, causing two problems. Number one, it encourages schools to charge
inflated tuition rates because of the “demand” and two, it creates a demand for
jobs that far outpaces the rate of hiring.
And now we get to O’Malley, who claims he has kept tuition rates for Maryland schools very low, citing tuition “freezes” he enacted in his first term and only a 3 percent hike in the rate from last year to this year. What he doesn’t explain is that while tuition may have been frozen during his first term, the University of Maryland raised its student fees significantly, something the local media did actually report on (surprisingly). But since student fees aren’t technically tuition, O’Malley could claim tuition was frozen.
Second, O’Malley kept the tuition increase to just 3 percent this past summer by ramming yet another tax increase through the General Assembly in a special session that hit the middle class in this state hard. The result? Even though my tuition bill may have only gone up 3 percent, my family has now been saddled with an increase in their tax bill of several hundred dollars. It would have been cheaper for my family to have paid the potential 10 percent increase in tuition instead of having it go the way it went!
Who
Martin O’Malley helped with this tax increase: No one in this state.
Who it hurt:
· In-state students paying not only more in tuition, but also more in higher taxes.
·
Maryland
residents who send their children to out-of-state schools who had to deal with
both tuition increases at those schools and higher taxes here at home.
Who gets off somewhere in the middle: Out-of-state students attending Maryland schools, who may have seen their tuition rate increase 5 percent, but who aren’t paying any new taxes to the state of Maryland in addition to that hike.
Instead of raising taxes, Martin O’Malley and the General Assembly should have spent the summer de-bloating the over-bloated higher education budget in this state. It is a system where bureaucrats have run unchecked for far too long. Chancellor Brit Kirwan shouldn’t be making $490,000 per year. Nor should Wallace Loh, president of UMD, be making $450,000 per year. The list goes on and on.
Taxes
should not have been raised in Maryland this summer, the spending on obnoxious,
public sector salaries should have been cut.
Jimmy Williams
Jimmy Williams
Diamondback
article: http://www.diamondbackonline.com/news/national/article_2ec83abc-f26e-11e1-9cb9-001a4bcf6878.html
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