PA College Students in Trouble
College Students in Limbo in PA as Budget is in Stalemate
All dressed up and no place to go, maybe. The state budget impasse in Pennsylvania has left 172,000 college students wondering if they will be able to get back to school in two weeks. Without grant money, students cannot pay the tuition and fees at Pennsylvania colleges. Without students paying tuition, more state workers, i.e. teachers, will be laid off. Its a vicious cycle that has been getting Pennsylvania deeper and deeper in the murky waters of fiscal fiascoes akin to those in California.
The new fiscal year began July 1st, and still no resolution. State workers have seen pay reductions, forced days off and layoffs for the past two months. However, direct pain to the private sector has been minimal, until now. College financial aide offices have been overwhelmed with calls and concerned students and parents flooding the office in an attempt to determine if school will start for them without their finances in order.
Who is really suffering here? Those that need the help the most. The impact of this curtailment may be profound. With the “social safety net” shrinking it will become vital for social workers to leave no stone unturned in helping clients to get and retain jobs and in doing what is possible to ensure that the children of of those in need get proper schooling. There is a kind of real politik at work here. The government is not going to help those that need it most and everything must be done to ensure that they be made more capable of helping themselves.
Of these issues it is education strikes me as the most important because it involves an emerging generation which must not be allowed the fall into the trap that is poverty. It is important that kids stay in school even though, as Kozol made clear a decade ago in his Savage Inequalities, the state of the schools is parlous; fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, which said that “separate” cannot be “equal,” thereby overturning Plessy v. Ferguson’s “separate but equal” doctrine, education in this country is still both “separate” and “unequal”.
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