Calif. Academic Praises Stimulus Package

The stimulus package helped save thousands of jobs at the educational institutions at California State University, its chancellor, Charles B. Reed, said at aNewsmaker press conference on March 2.

He said CSU is grappling with massive budge cuts, adding, “some call it melt-down,” and “we have lost 20% of our state support (to the tune of) $625 million.”

“We had been forced to raise student fees, cut enrollment by 40,000 students and furlough almost all of our employees two days a month,” he said.

Without the stimulus package, he said, job cuts would have been more widespread.

“Current students absorbed a 32% tuition raise in a single year,” he said, adding, “even today CSU students only pay about $4,000 a year, far less than at comparable state schools on the East Coast.”

Reed advocated for the state to reinvest in higher education, as a path to economic recovery and lambasted the California expenditure to “build and maintain world-class prisons,” while not paying enough attention and money to education system.

“Our (educational) state general fund allocation is about $2.35 billion, while the California prison system costs more than $10 billion per year,” he said. “California spends $49,000 per year to keep a single prisoner behind bars while the state’s contribution per student at the CSU is only $6,800.”

Reed called for “a federal role for higher education to enable assistance to underserved students past 12th grade,” urging policy makers in Washington to “do everything they to support higher education.”