Maybe we should.

It has no defense budget. California's colleges and universities are funded by its own income tax. It gets some federal funding, but not all that much. I don't think you understand what I'm talking about, frankly.

Cut it by 1-5% and earmark the money for higher education.

How do those cuts get to the states? And how much money does that come to? Where will the states spend it, even if it earmarked for education?

The devil is always in the details when it comes to government spending. Not so simple.

like tuition, room and board, meals, books.

I personally believe that the country should beef up community colleges and have kids do their first two years closer to home. I was a college freshman, but a somewhat mature one in my thinking, what I saw freshmen and freshwomen do was purely wasteful and would not have happened if they were more mature.

CA now has one free year of community college for residents--spearheaded by my assemblyman, Miguel Santiago--and he's currently working on expanding that to 2 years, so residents could get an associate's degree for free (I believe the bill is AB 2).

It may be piecemeal, but it's progress nonetheless.

Silicon Valley, I'm talking to you.

The Social Good has to be financed. Ignorance is not bliss.

40 years of cutting taxes for the wealthy and throwing surcharges at the middle and lower classes and this is what we are left with.

- yes, the military budget is killing this country, and that money could be used for colleges in a large number of ways
- there are a lot more people going to college now than in the 60s (1968 t0 2019 is 8% to 35%): https://www.statista.com/statistics/184272/educational-attainment-of-college-diploma-or-higher-by-gender/
- colleges have lots more requirements (special education, gender equity, etc.) than in the 60s.
- states provide much less support per person than they did in the 50s and 60s


It's not as simple as tax more and cover the costs....

Executives at colleges are getting huge salaries while turning professors into adjuncts.

I'd rather see a modest charge for college, perhaps a sliding scale as well as a cap on executive pay. I paid $500 per sememster which, while a lot for some students, is not insurmountable.

Tax corporations for starters.

I worked in UC Berkeley for more than 20 years. As you know the University of California is a public university that was free to the state’s resident students.

In the years that I worked there the cuts in funding were worse and worse each year. As staff we were underpaid more each year because salaries were frozen. Departments were all forced to cut back to skeleton staff over the years. I was among the old timers who were lucky enough to have a pension building during the time I worked there. Meantime real estate prices shot through the roof and taxes went up and it became prohibitive to live decently. Tuition was too high for any student not to borrow money, a lot of it, to put themselves through college. Gas prices alone take huge bites out of your salary because there is not any decent public transportation.

In order to retire and actually live within my means I had to leave California. I moved to New Mexico, to Santa Fe which is considered a pretty affluent and cultured city. I live quite comfortably here on a fraction of what I would in California.

I have no idea what California can do to become financially viable for the middle class. But I have no regrets about where I am. There are even a few things that I think are better in New Mexico than California. I’m happy here.

Educators and classrooms are cheap. Creative Commons textbooks, kept up to date by educators who are actually paid for the work, could be free.

Unfortunately many colleges and universities are trying to be Educational Disneylands to attract students who come from wealthy families, and students who are willing to take out huge student loans. Even so, most of the people who actually do the teaching are still treated like crap.

Same thing in medicine. People providing primary care and prescribing effective, generic, and appropriate medicine are not living in 6,000 square foot mansions and buying a new Mercedes every year.

Like you, the State of California paid for most of my education, and for that I am grateful because I was a pain in the ass. But overall, I think the investment paid off.

But I see a lot of money in colleges and universities now that wasn't there when I was in school.

Most of the classrooms and lecture halls at my University were not the kind of places that would make a kid say "Wow, I want to go to school here!" or impress their parents. Most of them looked like ordinary high school classrooms and auditoriums, and were designed and built on reasonable budgets by pretty much the same people who were building public high schools.

Going on college tours across the U.S.A. with my own kids, it was obvious that many colleges and universities, even state schools, are playing a brutal and expensive game of keeping up with the Joneses, as if they are going all out to attract the fickle children of billionaires. That kind of competition is expensive.