While you may be subconsciously avoiding any further columns with the words “budget cuts” or “financial crisis,” I am desperately trying to wake up from a nightmare where those words are already losing value.
The whole crisis of education — and thus the major crisis of higher education — is not completely an economic crisis, as many wish to believe, though it’s obviously affected by budget shortfalls.
Why or when was it taken for granted that universities couldn’t be affected by a sudden halt in the mad, high-speed train of the digital money world?
If the education services delivered by our educational systems and institutions was more meaningful than just a job-seeking tool, we wouldn’t be seeing such a boring battle of arguments and statistical indicators.
Numbers and comparisons hardly touch the real setback of the issue: The value of the knowledge produced and articulated by universities is getting weaker by the minute.
“To Louisiana College Students: Our government is spending more than we can afford, and I believe our universities are delivering less value than you deserve.” That was Gov. Bobby Jindal’s response to the avalanche of criticism he received last week, following the national attention received by a letter from Student Government President J Hudson calling Jindal back to Louisiana to take care of the University’s budget cut issues.
As a student to whom Jindal’s speaking, I decided to give special attention to understanding as clear as possible the meaning of the last words of his response: “Our universities are delivering less value than you deserve.”
OK, I admit the “value” he had in mind is a concept made up of numbers of graduates per year and all other kinds of indicators that are used to illustrate the performance of our — and his — flagship university. But I also think that a set of quantitative parameters are questionable to measure the contribution that a higher education institution can and should offer to a community.
Based on the immense geometrical process of academic inflation that we have seen for the past 10 years or so, two immediate reflections and consequences of Jindal’s affirmation make themselves clear to me — and hopefully to you, as well.
First, the value delivered by the University — if measured by how much having a degree helps you get a job — is really less than our parents expected when they sent us here. Second, if the value of the higher education we think we are achieving when we graduate is the false notion of certainty built during college years, it will drastically crash against a world of uncertainty as soon as we cross the bridges of LSU island toward the jungle of real life.
Back in Brazil, during my undergraduate years, one of the most significant happenings of my academic life was a huge strike of state university professors in 2002, followed by big protests and a longer strike by teachers from elementary to graduate schools all over the country.
The reason: precarious conditions of work, lack of substantial funding and lousy, undervalued salaries at state-federal universities.
But right after that, some private universities also started bankrupting, showing signs of trouble in different fields that proved the point of the overall, fundamental crisis to be evidence of the collapse of education as a whole, especially higher education.
It doesn’t matter how efficiently the budget issues are addressed and eventually solved. If the knowledge produced, articulated and “delivered” — to paraphrase Jindal’s response — by the University doesn’t burn itself down to be recreated in different ways and with different objectives, the words “budget cut” and “financial crisis” are doomed to lose value in whatever discussion we get ourselves to — just like our diplomas.
 
Marcelo Vieira is a 32-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_MVieira.
 
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Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]