Burnt Orange Report

Forgive me for repeating myself but,

The current tuition crisis in Texas is hardly suprising considering the unapologetic attitude of the current republican party regarding education both on the national and state levels. On this issue they appear to be united.
Education takes a back seat to tax cuts and special interest, it has become painfully obvious that the current republican administration would be happy to relegate todays youth back to a time when higher education was the playground of the wealthy.

As for Strayhorn's suspension of pre-paid tuition, this was a necessary and direct result of the degregulation of tuition rates. When there is no cap on tuition rates and they are rising with such a lack of predictabillity and completely out of sync with infaltion, it is impossible to invest the money in the system in such a way that would ensure that the money would be available to pay the tuition for those who invested in the program.

So we can actually blame Perry and the Republican Congress both for skyrocketing tuition costs and the death of prepaid tuition.

So now what, I don't know, either we elect individuals who have a larger interest in funding education in this state than they do in financing big buisness, or we go back to the days when only the wealthy have educational opportunities.

Doesn't the backstory on this go back to when Bush was governor and he changed the investment management of the Texas trust fund?
Just like everything else Bush touches, it seems everything gets looted. Is this the case here?

Seeing how I'm whistling in the dark here, what I would really like to see {heads up, intrepid students} is a series of graphs, in color, nice and clean, translating these data:

1) UT tuition for at least the last 50 years if not from the inception of UT and/or tuition.

2) The Texas trust fund, growth of the capital base and of the investment income, interest, etc.

3) Both balanced against inflation

4) WRT the trust fund, a graph of investment return - that is, the 'success' of investment over time since inception. Relative success is really the key word here; both the hard amounts gained per year as well as against some well defined standard, such as S&P 500.

5) Relative costs of the investment on a yearly basis; here's the hidey hole.

My interest is not just as an observer. When I started school in 1965 tuition was either $125 a semester or $250 (I forget it's been so long duh). Now it is 10-20x that amount. I have two daughters in school; this is serious.

Hopefully there are some statistical data miners of public info who can pull this together. A thoroughly obsessed person would also dig out the state's contribution per year, both actual and as a percent of total revenue. Certainly you could reuse the data as a class project in any case.

This situation is out of control and when that happens, go to the numbers. Seeing is believing.

This sounds like a job for new BORer John Pruett...

Good. Thanks.

I'll pass on two items I picked up today.
This is from rural/agrarian types, you know, real cowboys, who are pretty conservative by nature. They have two concerns as of today:
1) The SOTUS decision about taking personal property for non-public purposes (although that was shrouded in the 'long-term' public good).
2) Perry's Super Highway plan: the primary conerns over the vast taking of land and the fact the AG hasn't released the contract with the Spanish company.

Those that work the land are a minority now and damn well know it. They're threatened.