Editor’s note: Paul McCauley is a member of the Board of Directors for Student Media and presently works for the University as a graduate assistant. No preference was given in publishing this column.
Given the news of impending budget cuts of up to 15 percent, people are understandably upset. However, this problem goes beyond simply worrying about which programs get the ax. If there ever was a time for anyone with any connection the UNC system to pull together and fight for higher education, the time is now.
What all students, faculty, staff, alumni and their friends and families need to do is fight to get a solution that avoids cuts, even if it means accepting a small tax increase. The deficit hawks will have a fit, but this is the right way to do things — if we want to give people the opportunity to receive valuable educational experiences that will allow them to compete in the global economy, we need to maintain or improve funding for higher education.
The reality is, the global economy is still recovering from a massive shock, and competition for skilled jobs and careers will only increase as time goes by. Clearly, improving our higher education system is a top priority for ensuring that American workers have the critical thinking and technical skills they need to compete for the best jobs out there. And improve we must: recent articles in the “New York Times” indicate college students may be idling too much, studying less and learning less.
I am not an academic expert on education. Yet based on my own experiences and the changes I’ve had to make when adjusting to graduate school, I do not find it difficult to see these claims as unreasonable. Students tend to ask about what material will be on exams or focus on the minutiae of term paper formats, rather than asking critical questions about the material or drawing connections between the various elements within a given discipline.
Thus, we must extend some of the graduate philosophy down to the undergraduate level: we cannot simply teach students for them to receive grades. We must teach our students to think. Unfortunately, while this is not a problem money can necessarily solve, it is one that is exacerbated by cutting $80 million from the University’s operating budget. And, in the critical process of thinking that we may need to encourage students to embrace, this problem is not limited to N.C. State alone.
The entire UNC system will likely feel the extraordinary pain of major budget cuts, and these cuts will likely become permanent unless we unite against them. All students, faculty and staff members have an obvious reason to do so: with departments imminently on the chopping block, some smaller departments that educate effectively may fall to the unfeeling blade of fiscal austerity. Yet alumni, both old and new, also have a stake in this: if the UNC system begins to lose its reputation for educational excellence that classes of years past toiled to build and maintain, the value of a degree may decline.
This problem transcends any intercollegiate rivalry — the bottom line is that everyone who is attending or who has attended a school in the UNC system should fight these budget cuts. This does not solve the structural inequalities in higher education and employment, but it’s a good start.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2010/08/22/why-are-college-students-studying-less
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/01/24/does-college-make-you-smarter
