More on seed corn eating

by David Safier

Florida's state universities, squeezed early by the slumping economy's effect on tax revenues, instituted a three-year cap on freshman enrollment last year. The mammoth California State University system — with 450,000 students — has announced plans to reduce its head count by up to 10,000 students for the next school year. Absent a boost in state funding, the smaller, more-selective University of California system has warned of a similar reduction. Enrollment limits are also under consideration in Tennessee and Washington.

Robert Reich, Clinton's Secretary of Labor and now a prof at U.C. Berkeley, calls these cuts in education a "crisis in America's human capital."

We¹re bailing out every major bank to get financial capital flowing again. But we¹re squeezing the main sources of our nation's human capital. Yet America's future competitiveness and the standard of living of our people depend largely our peoples' skills, and our capacities to communicate and solve problems and innovate  not on our ability to borrow money.

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So why are we bailing out Wall Street and not our nation¹s public schools and colleges? Partly because the crisis in financial capital is immediate while our human capital crisis is unfolding gradually. Headlines scream what's happening to our money but not to our kids.

We throw around hundreds of billions of dollars at failed banks with no oversight — "You screwed up royally while you rewarded yourself handsomely, so here, we're trusting you to spend all this money we're giving you wisely" — but we're bankrupting our youth's educational opportunities instead of using a few of those billions to prop up our schools, kindergarten through graduate school.

And people will continue to say, "It doesn't do any good to just throw money at education."