Those Pesky Budget Cuts: Penn State Fayette

Yes, I heard about the ninja. Among other things. I'll get to it. It's finals week. Please excuse my infrequent updates - back-to-back finals tomorrow morning starting at 8:30.

Anyway.

Among Corbett's ridiculous proposed cuts to education is a cut to Penn State, which wouuld lower its funding from $334 million to $165 million.

Penn State officials said the cuts would be "devastating" and would "spell catastrophic change for students and (the) state."

The President said, "A funding gap this large is going to fundamentally change the way we operate, from the number of students we can educate, to the tuition we must charge, to the programs we offer and the services we can provide, to the number of employees and the research we undertake."

Penn State has about 24 branch campuses, some of which may be forced to close. One is in Fayette County. It's our only college. We do have things like the Laurel Business Institute, but what if our only college closes, or tuition goes up? Students wouldn't have many options. Pitt is facing the same problems, not to mention cuts to the State System of Higher Education which would impact California, Clarion, Edinboro, Indiana, Slippery Rock and nine other universities. Then there are the already expensive Catholic universities, where you have to deal with things like no overnight guests of the opposite sex - which doesn't make sense to me because if you're gay you can totally be getting it on - and I've heard stories of kids getting fined for having condoms. Yeah, punish the kids for making smart sexual decisions. Great idea. The one perk is getting Holy Days off.

Penn State Fayette students are all wound up and will be putting up a fight, and the Herald-Standard found students that illustrate the fact that some of them have no other option. Tania Bosley is one, and said the campus is her only option because of a full-time job, family and evening classes. Plus she depends on state funding to help pay.

"If I lost that money due to all these cuts, it would put too much of a financial burden on me to continue," she told the paper. "And I also chose this campus because it was the most convenient. Going anywhere else just doesn't make sense for me, and I imagine that's the same for a lot of people in my situation. The reality is, if this campus would have to close, there would be a lot of people who would not seek higher education here in this area."

There are already a lot of people who don't. No one has to and you should do what makes you happy, but the numbers are interesting. We have 4,864 college students and only 11.5% of people aged 25 or older have a bachelor's degree or higher.

Once again, we're not being helped. We're being hurt.