Michigan tuition hike protest

LANSING, Mich.--A group of some 30 Michigan State University (MSU) students and faculty picketed the state capitol October 30 to combat both recent budget cuts and tuition hikes to public education in Michigan.

The state budget, recently signed into law, will cut an unprecedented 61 percent of funding for higher education, while nixing the Michigan Promise Scholarship and decreasing per pupil funding for grades K-12 by $292.

Tuition at MSU will increase more than 10 percent in the next two years, and room and board is to rise by more than 5 percent in the same period. And, as the MSU provost's touching "Shaping the Future" PowerPoint presentation clarifies, students will be paying more for markedly scaled-back programs as part of the so-called "boldness by design" strategy for the budget: some programs, such as American Studies, Retailing and Geology, will cease to exist altogether.

MSU was the nation's first land-grant university. It was created, among other reasons, in an effort to make higher education an equitable opportunity. That claim could scarcely be made about the realities students face today in terms of higher education. Most will need a steady diet of loans, constraining their lives for decades to come, for the now five years of school required in order to earn their bachelors' degree. For many others, college is simply not economically feasible.

A mere one-fourth of the funding for higher education comes from the state in Michigan. The rest must come from the private sector. Like any company within the private sector, Michigan universities must now work largely within the bounds of profit and loss. Education, just like bubble gum or gasoline, is just another product to be sold.

This is reflected in aspects of the university budget left untouched. No cutbacks will be coming to the famed "Turfgrass Science" program, which exists almost entirely to make money for golf courses and stadiums. The absurd funding for sports, which have nothing to do with education, will come through restructuring unscathed.

Unrest is brewing, however, in the state with highest unemployment in the country. And fights dotting the rest of the country around public education--including those in Illinois, California and Ohio--have proven that people can successfully fight back.