Public support for higher ed was key to U.S. prosperity
This from the Herald-Leader:
In a recent visit to Eastern Kentucky University, Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton voiced a central tenet of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, best summed up as: I’ve got mine; you’re on your own.
Like so many who espouse an anti-government form of rugged individualism, Hampton seems blissfully unaware of how much she has benefited from opportunities provided by others, mainly taxpayers.
Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton
And now that she’s climbed the ladder of opportunity, she seems to want to pull it up behind her.
In defending Gov. Matt Bevin’s cuts to higher education during an interview with The Eastern Progress, Hampton said: “But if you say college is a right, what you’re saying is somebody must provide that. The taxpayers must provide that. Those of us who go to work must give part of their earnings to put you through college, and I disagree with that. It is not a right, it is a privilege.”
In the same interview, Hampton, without a hint of self irony, recounted how she worked her way through college with help from “grants and scholarships and later the GI Bill.”
Hampton, 57, earned her undergraduate degree at Wayne State University, a public university that voters brought into Michigan’s system of taxpayer-supported higher education in 1959, the year after Hampton was born. She served seven years in the U.S. Air Force — also supported by taxpayers — becoming a computer systems officer and gaining experience that boosted her later career in the corrugated packaging industry. She earned an MBA with help from the taxpayer-supported GI Bill.
Her advice to students’ worried about spiraling tuition: “There are other schools. You know, let’s inject some competition in there. If you guys decided, ‘hey you know what I think the tuition is too high here,’ and if enough people decided tuition was too high and started actually shopping your dollars, what do you think will happen? Tuition comes down.”
The students explained that Kentucky has no four-year colleges with lower costs than Eastern.
Hampton, who ran unsuccessfully for the legislature in 2014, also seems uninformed about Kentucky’s education status, saying “not only are we low on the totem poll in education but when we are ... getting standardized testing on a national level we’re not making par. And so, those scholarships and stuff are out of reach for some students in rural areas, because they are not able to make the grades that they need because of the history of education.”
In fact, Kentucky’s fourth- and eighth-graders outperform their peers nationally in reading and science on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Kentucky teens are graduating from high school at above the national rate and going on to college at almost the national rate though too many leave before graduating.
A little over a generation ago, Kentucky was at the bottom educationally. But the legislature enacted ambitious reforms and a penny increase in the sales tax that propelled young Kentuckians into the nation’s mainstream — a gain that’s at risk of being lost because Kentucky keeps cutting education.
Hampton advised students to seek a degree in an area where graduates are in demand, saying, “ I would not be studying history.”
If she did study history, she would learn that this country’s middle class and many of the 20th century’s great scientific and technological breakthroughs were built on taxpayer support for higher education.
1 comment:
"Hampton advised students to seek a degree in an area where graduates are in demand, saying, “ I would not be studying history.”
What she clearly meant, and you know full well, is that in todays economy you better be getting an education that causes an employer to find value in your knowledge.
You are being deliberately obtuse in order to discredit the commonsense observations of our Lt Gov. You are better than that Richard. As proven in your comments above about Gov Bevin's veto of tax exemptions.
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