CALIFORNIA'S 2011-2012 STATE BUDGET : HOW ARE STRUGGLING MIDDLE CLASS FAMILIES MEANT TO AFFORD THE STEEPLY INCREASED PUBLIC UNIVERSITY TUITION ?????...........

The greater than $25 billion California budget deficit that the State Legislature and former Governor Schwarzenegger, and the Legislature and current Governor Brown, are still contentiously battling to arrest - has and will continue to cause adverse fallout to the citizens of the the Golden State.  One of the many vital and essential programs and state services that are suffering from the political impasse and financial crisis, are very deep cuts to third level higher education in California.  The newly enacted state budget eliminated more than $1.3 billion from public colleges and universities budgets.  That means increases in the tuition and fees at the University of California and California State University, campuses that are doubled from what they were five years ago.  The coming academic year tuition costs alone, at U.C. campuses will be $12,000.00 +; and the class fees for the coming year at C.S.U. campuses will be almost $5,500.00.  Even Community College fees statewide will rise to an all time high of $36.00 per unit, which for a fulltime equivalency, 15 unit course load will cost $1,080.00, in 2011-2012.  With the unemployment rate in California as of July standing at 11.7%, which is two and a half percent higher than the national rate, millions of our middle class families are suffering from a lack of jobs available to the adult parents of college age students, and the layoff and loss of jobs, the economic recession has caused them to endure.  The affluent might well say, let these students work harder to pay their way through college.  But if good jobs at decent wages, are not available how are they to do that ?  The glory days of California Higher Education following World War II until the late 1960's; was a time when their was bipartisan poltical consensus on the part of Republican and Democratic Governors, and State Legislators to make and maintain financial accessibility to a public college and university education readily available to seeking and deserving third level students.  Today, as it has increasing become over the past forty years, access to a college education is a political pawn, to be used and abused by political and governing establishment to further their own agendas on the backs of the middle class.  I apply the same standard to Education in California, that I have from my youth to the present.  It must be continuously reformed and renewed.  Bureaucracy must be cut and every dollar committed to educating our citizens made as fully effective as can be.  If the Governor and Legislature, the College and University Administrators, and the Citizens will only put politics, perks, and personal proclivities in regards to Higher Education in California, we can and will, find a way to set the tuitions and fees at attainable and reasonable levels, that makes a first class education accessible to all our third level students, without driving them and their families into ever deeper, enveloping debt...........Challenging Californians To Make Public Higher A Reasonable Unobstructed Opportunity For Our College And University Students,   Fr.  Troy