When I was a young woman fucking around at Santa Barbara City College — I am 50! — the California community college system charged $6 a credit. That worked out to usually $18 a class, or a hundred dollars or so a semester if you were taking a full load. Textbooks came in at … more than that. Let’s call it $19,000. When they raised the per-credit cost from $6 to $9, we protested. California community college is supposed to be free.
Now Santa Barbara City College has tuition (in-state!) of $1,232 (plus another $20,000-ish for books and housing). Just the tuition has gone up 1200 percent.
When my best friends were kids — almost all my real life friends are 75, because they are the ones who were 50 when I was 25, and had “dinner” and “liquor” and “a house that didn’t have my family in it” — the University of California was completely free, including law school at Berkeley, and they spent their time bitching that they had to pay a hundred dollars for books.
Fifteen years ago, when I taught journalism at UC Riverside and poli sci at UC Irvine, tuition, books and housing for in-state students had risen to about $35,000 a year, and I had students who lived in their cars.
What had been paid for as the common good, out of honest to god people’s taxes, had started to charge tuition coincidentally when college was no longer de facto segregated to just white kids. That’s why those mean old white Republican congresswomen could sniff that they paid for their college themselves, and who are we to demand “free stuff” and socialisms: When they did it all on their lonesomes, it cost fifty bucks and a sandwich.
That’s right: Your state used to pay for its kids to go to college. Because your state used to think it was good for its kids to learn stuff and get jobs and pay taxes and send the next crop of kids to school.
Our kids are boned now, and we all know it, and half of us (including some who are otherwise good-ish liberals) think those damned kids need to just shut up and pay their loans off, and if they don’t take out loans and go to college, they should work at McDonalds where there should not be a minimum wage because McDonalds jobs are for lazy losers who didn’t bother to go to school.
That’s some catch, that Catch-22!
But a happy thing has happened this month, and it doesn’t apply to everybody because not every good thing does: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a budget agreement appropriating $25 million annually for the “Fostering Futures” program that will allow the 60,000 kids in the foster care system to get free college, whether in the community college, the CSU system, or the UCs. And it will include tuition, housing, and books.
When we take children from their parents — and unlike many on the Left, I am not against that, having raised a child who was! — we have a responsibility to them. This is so obvious to me I don’t even know how to expand that thought. Kids in foster care usually do not have awesome lives, which I am going to leave undetailed here. And their outcomes, when they age out of the system, are too often harrowing. Twenty percent become homeless immediately upon aging out. Another 20 percent will be homeless at least once before they’re 19. A quarter will be incarcerated within two years. Only four percent of kids who age out of the system go to college now.
And I’ve already seen somebody weep for the poor poor taxpayers having to fork over the tuition for other people’s kids.
The kids in foster care are ours. The state took them in our name — hopefully, usually, for better than they had — and it’s up to us to give them better.
And when we’re done with that, we can go back to the good old days and give EVERYBODY eat.
OK, for people who get tedious and pedantic.
These proposals don't make college FREE. What they do is, we pay for it as a utility that returns multiples of the cost, to all of us who pay in for it. Like highways, water systems, etc.
I'm self-employed and quite fortunate, so I pay in a lot more taxes than most people. And since my kids have gone to college, I've paid for some of that too, and co-signed on loans for which I'm liable. So I do have skin in this game. And it would benefit me, personally, a helluva lot more to chip in for college for every kid in Minnesota via taxes, than to have to sign on loans that total more than my first home mortgage and the most expensive car I've ever bought combined.
It's better for America to not ration education on the basis of ability to pay. Just like healthcare, housing, transportation, utilities, and damn near everything else.
This is such a nice times thing, it actually made me cry.
I don't fucking care. Tax me more if it'll help foster kids. Maybe then they won't end up in my office.