Skip to main content

Vice President Biden Strolls through the Nevada Higher Ed Apocalypse

Joe Biden was in Reno the other day, doing one of those stock vice president speeches where he made a bold call for high school kids to go to college, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal:

Vice President Joe Biden spent time Thursday imploring Galena High School students to make some kind of post-secondary education a mandate upon graduation from high school.

The whole thing would be utterly trivial if it weren’t for the fact that Nevada’s higher education system is starting to resemble something out of Cormac McCarthy. A blighted dystopian hellscape where the few surviving students wander aimless in the wastes.

Ok, slight exaggeration. But Nevada’s higher education system has been hit hard since the recession. In Reno, state tuition is up almost 60 percent. Cuts for this fiscal year alone were 14 percent, coming on top of a 13 percent cut from previous years. Its six-year graduation rate is a lousy 40 percent.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Nevada Higher Education Chancellor Dan Klaich lean on the panic button in a recent memo:
Since too many of our elected leaders seem to be so focused on the bottom line, allow me to summarize the previous points: Nevada public higher education will no longer be competitive with any state in the U.S., let alone the Western states. Our main competition for students, faculty, and businesses needed to diversify our economy will be with Third World countries. […]
This budget crisis cannot be solved with new taxes alone, and certainly there are concerns with this budget other than education. There will be cuts, and I expect cuts to education. Everyone must share the pain to heal our state. What I am saying is that to pretend that cuts alone should be the answer is wrong.
If you want to continue to live in a state that consistently ranks in the bottom of every education and quality of life measure, then by all means, sit back and watch your state burn.

Italics in the original. It is true that Nevada’s economy is in sad shape. It has the highest unemployment rate in the country. As Klaich says, some cuts are probably inevitable, but he has outlined some slight revenue increases to patch the budget and avoid staggering tuition hikes. Nevada’s Republican party has gone medieval doctor, using the state’s atrocious graduation rate as justification for further cutting.

Might have been a good thing for the vice president to mention.

Cross-posted at College Guide.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Did Reality Winner Leak to the Intercept?

So Reality Winner, former NSA contractor, is in federal prison for leaking classified information — for five years and three months, the longest sentence of any whistleblower in history. She gave documents on how Russia had attempted to hack vendors of election machinery and software to The Intercept , which completely bungled basic security procedures (according to a recent New York Times piece from Ben Smith, the main fault lay with Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito ), leading to her capture within hours. Winner recently contracted COVID-19 in prison, and is reportedly suffering some lingering aftereffects. Glenn Greenwald has been furiously denying that he had anything at all to do with the Winner clusterfuck, and I recently got in an argument with him about it on Twitter. I read a New York story about Winner, which clearly implies that she was listening to the Intercepted podcast of March 22, 2017 , where Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill expressed skepticism about Russia actually b

The Basic Instinct of Socialism

This year I finally decided to stop beating around the bush and start calling myself a democratic socialist. I think the reason for the long hesitation is the very long record of horrifying atrocities carried out by self-described socialist countries. Of course, there is no social system that doesn't have a long, bloody rap sheet, capitalism very much included . But I've never described myself as a capitalist either, and the whole point of socialism is that it's supposed to be better than that. So of course I cannot be a tankie — Stalin and Mao were evil, terrible butchers, some of the worst people who ever lived. There are two basic lessons to be learned from the failures of Soviet and Chinese Communism, I think. One is that Marxism-Leninism is not a just or workable system. One cannot simply skip over capitalist development, and any socialist project must be democratic and preserve basic liberal freedoms. The second, perhaps more profound lesson, is that there is no s

Varanus albigularis albigularis

That is the Latin name for the white-throated monitor lizard , a large reptile native to southern Africa that can grow up to two meters long (see pictures of one at the Oakland Zoo here ). In Setswana, it's called a "gopane." I saw one of these in my village yesterday on the way back from my run. Some kids from school found it in the riverbed and tortured it to death, stabbing out its eyes, cutting off its tail, and gutting it which finally killed it. It seemed to be a female as there were a bunch of round white things I can only imagine were eggs amongst the guts. I only arrived after it was already dead, but they described what had happened with much hilarity and re-enactment. When I asked why they killed it, they said it was because it would eat their chickens and eggs, which is probably true, and because it sucks blood from people, which is completely ridiculous. It might bite a person, but not unless threatened. It seems roughly the same as killing wolves that