The article in in the March 23Gazette concerning Holyoke Community College’s budget problems raised troubling questions. For most of the past 25 years, interspersed with a few token gestures, the Massachusetts legislature has relentlessly cut funding for its public colleges.
Although much lip service has been paid to the importance of public colleges, I don’t believe that affordable public higher education is of major importance to most of our legislators – and perhaps Massachusetts taxpayers as well. Stable, sufficient funding for public colleges will probably remain a thing of the past.
Nonetheless, this is one of those “tip of the iceberg” issues that will hamper our future economic stability unless we do something about it soon. Many recent (and not so recent) college graduates are putting off buying homes and starting families due to college debt – a drain on the housing market.
Jobs requiring post-secondary and college level skills go unfilled, and eventually many of those employers will move to where they can find a better trained workforce – such as Taiwan or China. Unless the U.S. can compete globally with an educated and trained workforce, the middle class will continue to disintegrate with its best years behind it.
As a college student back in the 1970s I could pay all my UMass tuition, fees and books with money I made from a summer job, and my school year expenses (including transportation) from a minimum wage part-time job. My entire college education was paid for with my own modest earnings, not requiring any loans. This was an economic model that worked for me, a typical child of blue-collar workers. We need to get back to that model, where anyone who really wants to go to college can do so by a little hard work and no loans.
Raymond Fontaine
Westhampton