U.S. Education Major Problems Ahead

The US Higher Education system is in a severe financial crisis as the state and federal governments have cut back on funding to universities. The tax cuts at the federal level has led to major decreases in federal spending and has forced the states to increase spending in other areas such as health care and highways, where the federal government shares a large part of the costs and the states get more revenues for each state dollar spent. The programs at the K-12 level permit students to transfer out of schools failing to meet the minimum standards, but this permits only the “good” students to transfer out as the private schools won’t take the poorer students. This results in making it more difficult for the poor schools to improve as the better students leave for better schools. States therefore must focus on improving the poor schools in order to keep the federal funding and the state higher education budgets suffer as higher education federal funds are not tied to any federal standards for school performance. In addition many public schools in the K-12 level are unionized with contracts for a 3 to 5 year period and cuts are difficult to implement in a short time frame. The federal budget prepared by the president is a deficit budget without considering any of the tentative war expenses and yet he is still proposing additional tax cuts that will tend to cause more financial problems for higher education.