How do other countries handle education? And where do they invest the money safed from cutting? Or where do they cut money to spend more on education?
It is very educational to hear more about what's going on around the world. Here in California, the state government has been in a condition of essentially permanent financial crisis for the past 15 years, and one casualty has been the University of California system. Scholars and researchers have been leaving in alarming numbers, and fewer and fewer students can afford to attend classes. There was never any kind of absolute guarantee of being able to attend, but tuition for California residents used to be very inexpensive. And of course UC was the domain of some epic developments in the later 20th century in a variety of disciplines.
The California state government budget is about the size of the entire economy of Finland (~US$200bn), so you might well ask, with all that money, what is the problem here?
The obvious answer is that political factions are entrenched in a pretty nasty long term fight over fundamental priorities: those who don't like large successful public institutions that overshadow private ones, and have placed the state in a condition of budgetary insecurity that allows them to whittle away public investment every time the budget comes up again; versus those who feel the opposite, and want to change the way the state raises money so that the budget is less volatile.
The less obvious answer is that these factions don't exist in a vacuum -- they represent a real divide among the people of California and the kind of society they want to live in (or think they want to live in). The kinds of choices necessary to stabilize the budget and make it less vulnerable to boom and bust economics are unpopular because they involve shifting the tax base, plus some people like the vulnerability and want to exacerbate it.
But one consequence of this is that the public university system -- one of the foremost education and research institutions in the world, chemical elements named after it, jokes about finding enough parking for all the Nobel laureates -- is now crumbling. A great institution can weather a year of difficulties, or multiple years, but not unending decades. The damage becomes permanent and difficult to reverse, and it's hard not to think that Californians have some kind of cultural death wish, and to feel sad about that.
