If You Want A Degree, It's Going To Cost You
Oh, the college education. When I think of the means of getting a degree and the best four years of any educated man's life, college comes to mind. When I think of one of the biggest cash grabs to plague the United States of America, college also comes to mind. Higher education is not cheap by any means. One may be better off selling their soul to some higher being just to pay tuition — not including housing costs of course.
But why is the price of spending four or more years learning semi-relevant stuff so incredibly high? Well, before we get to that, lets discuss just how high these costs are. Compared to about 35 years ago, college tuition has nearly doubled in price to an average of $9,139, and it is still increasing. "Well Hugh Mungus, isn't that huge price tag due to inflation"? Ha, no, it's not. In fact, tuition has risen at a much higher rate than inflation. To add, in 1980, state funding for college had already increased by 390 percent from 11.1 billion to 48.2 billion within the previous 20 years. So what's the deal with the weighty price tag? Despite the important positions professors have in educating young college minds, the money is not really going into their pockets. Instead, it is going into the pockets of the enormous amount of University administrators that colleges seem to have "picked up" in the past 30-40 years. With the information Campos gives in the article, it's a 221 percent increase from 3,800 dollars to 12,183 in the California Polytechnic University alone. That's not all, many more high-ranking university administrators are making seven digit salaries from the tuition of students, and for no significant reason. As Campos states, there is no truly valid argument to defend this trend, and certainly no "alternative facts" to justify it. As for how to fix it, we need policies to establish limits on the amount and salary of administrative staff, but it seems like that time is not coming any time soon. So students, and most likely the children of said students, will continue to pay large amounts of cold, hard cash to earn a degree and hopefully get a moderately satisfying job.
After 45 years, it has been estimated that over $1 trillion was thrown into a pit, covered in gasoline and then lit on fire by the government in the name of War on Drugs, but no matter how much money is put into it nothing will change as long as America lacks the political will to change its failure of a drug policy. In March, even the commander in chief of the War on Drugs admitted he messed up and was walking in circles for the past years. Admitting your mistakes is the first step into actually solving them. According to the National Prescription Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit in Atlanta, the overdose epidemic kills 30,000 Americans per year. That a lot more than how many people die to a shark per year, the most deaths reported by sharks per year is like 10 or something low like that. Our former president Obama has already started making reforms for our failed drug policy. He created the following three policies to help with this change, First, health insurers must now cover drug treatment as a requirement of Obamacare. Second, draconian drug sentences have been scaled back, helping to reduce the number of federal drug prisoners by more than 15 percent. Third, over the screams of prohibitionists in its ranks, the White House is allowing marijuana's march out of the black market, also known as legalization of weed for "medicinal use", it's a start at least and we must start somewhere so Obama's three policies are much better than nothing being done at all and resulting in more money being burned away for this imaginary war.
Welcome to the second blog of my weekly posts. This week I will be focusing on a different topic that needs your attention.You may think of cats and dogs as just pets but they are much more than that, a cat or dog can be your best friend and companion for their entire life. There are over thousands of animals in our area who are in great need of a home. This is an issue we can fix easily just as NBC10 has attempted with much success with their "Clear the Shelter" Day on August 15, 2015. During that day NBC10 partnered with 30 area animal shelters and waived all adoption fees so others can be attracted and encouraged to adopt through a shelter. However, there is still a problem with the adoption of animals as only 20 percent of people who adopt do it from a shelter. The other 80 percent chose a pet store which does not benefit abandoned and homeless animals in the streets. Due to the success of "Clear the Shelter" Day I believe we could solve this problem of only 20 percent of pets being adopted from shelters to a much higher percentage if people who are interested in adopting a pet in the near future, and if they aren't thinking of adopting a pet we could use some "convincing" to make them want to adopt a pet, such as a big pit bull.
