Does no one care about higher education anymore?

Over the weekend, the Washington State Legislature passed a biennial budget with a 26% budget cut for the University of Washington. That means that on July 1, over one quarter of the funding the state of Washington has provided to UW annually will no longer exist. As was said in the email sent out to UW students this "is by far the largest reduction in state support to a flagship university by any state in the nation. It takes our state funding level back to where it was more than a decade ago and drops the portion of the state budget dedicated to four-year higher education to an all-time low."

This means that UW students are looking at a tuition increase, many UW employees are going to be laid off, and the educational system is going to suffer dramatically. WTF? After all the hoopla about how the US is falling behind other countries in terms of education and ability to compete in a world economy, let alone WA state schools needing to stay competitive with other Universities around the country, here we are cutting the UW budget by over a quarter? On top of the fact that all of the other 4-year higher education systems in WA also got huge budget cuts. I mean I get that we are in a major financial crisis and have a huge budget deficit (hello 9 billion in WA state alone), but seriously, higher education gets the biggest cut of all? More then any other areas? I don't have a solution for what should have gotten more cuts, and of course no one wants their money to be taken, but I can't help but feel that there should have been a way to spread out the cuts a little more so that UW didn't get such a large one!

Read the Letter the President of UW sent out