Education and budget

Recently there has been a lot of uproar about how much dollars are funded for an education purposes at Universities and Community colleges. I came across an article titled “Higher Education” while going through “The Texas Tribune”. This article states that the “Funding for public academic institutions is based on formulas prepared by the coordinating board and based primarily on enrollments and semester credit hours.” All these esteemed institutions named University of Texas, which has numerous branches located at Arlington, San Antonio, Dallas, North Texas and many more, and including A&M and all of its branches; depends on an income from “Permanent University Fund”. Regardless, for all other universities legislature has established some source of funding from higher education board.

After the 10 Billion state budget shortfall increasing the tuition fees where only the option. But this step seems not suitable for many students and their parents.  The loss of 10B occurred when Universities were assigned to take care of tuitions themselves and manage their tuitions rate. All these lawmakers and legislators of course, are trying to get back lost fund by blaming and punishing Universities. I personally think that if such responsibilities are given to Universities directly by education board then they must have thought about it more delicately. Texas is already facing budget problem and sources of funds for education like property taxes Texas lotto, etc are just not enough to cover the upcoming budget short fall.

It seems that when states have to do any budget cutting, education is the first to suffer. Makes one wonder, doesn’t it?

Guns or Books in bag-pack?

Reading one of my classmate’s blog bring books not guns where he was debating that guns should not be allowed in college or universities, and I completely favor his argument.  As for example he talks about recent incident which that happened at the Library of University of Texas at Austin.  He personally doesn’t feel safe allowing gun in campus and I agree that. I wouldn’t feel safe if I knew my classmate has gun along with his/her books or my professor carries gun. Even at some point we all agree that someone carries gun for self-defense, but still chances are high that it could be misused. Someone with strong emotion might want to use gun or even some kind of personal issues might force to use gun.  My colleague also states that campus police are trained well enough and will respond in a professional manner in emergency situation.

I know in mass of thousand students you never know what might come up but allowing everyone to carry a gun is surely not better idea. 

Cutting education budget means cutting education

I came across an article where it said that legislature is likely to cut education budget to meet $25billion budget gap. Texas likely to face budget crisis, and in order to prepare for it lawmakers are planning to cut budget on education, laying off hundreds of state workers and public universities employee.  Our budget gap is now larger compare to California.

If education employee loses their job then this will affect the students, having higher number of students in class will certainly affect in student education.  As budget is cutoff, chances of using old textbooks is higher, lack of modern and new technology will also have direct impact on student education.

The author is successful in making it clear to the reader that the Texas budget gap has grown in recent years. It’s been ages now Texans are facing crisis and seems like Perry has got nothing in the store to do for them. From my point of view too, massive downturn in educational fields could be seen during upcoming government session .The article concludes on a positive note by putting the hopes on the government and being hopeful of its successful actions. Let’s wait and watch what’s upcoming governor has to do about it.