Hafgana Al Haskalah

There is a giant hafgana (um... in English... protest... yes, that's the word) going on directly in front of my building. I was outside in it for a while, but the sound was just unbearable. The matter at hand: students protesting the hike in fees. Students and faculty have been on strike for the last few days which means my roommates have been home more than usual. Some classes are still meeting, but not on campus. For example, Yakar was a crowded mess because a number of Judaica classes from Hebrew U were using the facilities.

This is an interesting clash to two recent articles in the NYTimes spotlighting trends in American higher education.
This article talks about how the top colleges are just being flooded with overqualified applicants so much so that they are admitting the lowest percentages of applicants in history.
This article explains how the new president of Sarah Lawrence wants to attract a wider population, particularly those that might fear the whopping $50,000/yr price tag.

Mathew Henry Hall sums it up in this cartoon posted on Insidehighered.com.

As someone who is going back to school shortly, and returning to the U. S. public school system after having been away since 1998, the issues are close to home. While I have happily accepted Oregon's financial offer to study there, I am aware that the stipend I will be living on is truly peanuts. And hey, I'm one of the lucky ones to have received a stipend on top of a tuition waiver, health insurance and other benies.

For the vast majority of students in the US, debt is a fact of life. In Israel, students don't often *yet* go broke paying for school, but they commonly run a "minus" in their bank accounts. What does this mean? I think American society is coming around to the fact that at the very least all children deserve free health care. But what about free education at the higher levels? And does it count if the public schools in your area are terrible and there is NO HOPE of actually achieving/learning in that environment?

I actually don't see a clear way out of the mess. One could easily suggest, "lets reroute all that money going to Iraq and Afghanistan and throw it at education." First of all, that's not how policy works in the US, sorry, wish it was. And secondly, I'm not sure that this is purely an issue of money. It is an issue of communal values, educational philosophy, and short time horizons. I don't feel confident that our society knows how to solve this problem. I don't have a good solution.

Pics to follow.