Namita Bhasin

I was just about to make my last tuition payment ever - about $3800 - and I got to thinking how (while I definitely will not miss that part of college) it really wasn’t a bad deal at all for the kind of education I’ve gotten. My 4 years at Berkeley are worth much more than the dollar value I paid for it.

I consider myself a relatively successful product of the public education system and a very ardent supporter of it. I’m going to be that hokey alumnus that donates to her elementary school and visits her first grade teacher until she retires. Of course, this has a lot to do with the fact that my parents had the foresight to move to Cupertino for its awesome school district before housing prices tripled overnight. I’ve gotten some of the best that public education has to offer, so I guess I’m a little biased. That doesn’t stop me from wholeheartedly supporting the idea, though. Education is a fundamental necessity, a huge leveler of the playing field, and that’s something the government ought to make a priority above many other things.

Right now funding for education sucks. I’m not impractical enough to suggest that it top the List of Important Things We Really Ought to Pay For (see my rant on healthcare) but it definitely deserves more attention than it’s getting in comparison to things like felons’ expenses or the size of chickens’ cages (sorry). You know, if the American public as a whole was smarter, a lot of dumb issues wouldn’t even come up in the first place. Just saying.

Don’t expect priorities to shift around with the miraculous surplus that everyone is waiting on the edge of their seat for Obama to deliver. Californians, don’t hold your breath for anything Arnie says, we’re way too far out of money. This is how it’s going to happen: one day, China and India will finally, effectively, scare the crap out of the US. We will fear losing our intellectual superiority to these quickly rising powerhouses and will begin throwing money into education - probably into math and science - just like we did during the Cold War with Russia, when it was imperative to our security and much more that our weaponry and space-exploring abilities were better than theirs. To be fair, education had also expanded from 1910-1940, but my interpretation of a primary reason for that is the lack of employment during the Great Depression and the hope that more education would better chances to find some. The next time it will be more refined than an international pissing contest but still bear traces of desperation - it will be a fight for economic power and respect.

(Disclaimer: I need to do more research into this; I’m going off of what I know but haven’t looked up the facts) When my dad went to IIT Kanpur from 1978-81, a semester at one of the most prestigious engineering institutes in the world cost basically next to nothing. India subsidizes education heavily, and this opens up opportunities for numbers of brilliant young people that would otherwise never be able to afford the luxury of college education, let alone one of such quality. This has led to the unfortunate (for India) consequence of brain drain. For the US, though, it has provided a substantial and free boost to the economy, as waves of immigration to this country are historically inclined to do. Again, I know my perspective is biased, but a giant segment of Silicon Valley can thank the Indian education system for its very existence. However, I believe that this pattern will begin to change in the next generation or two. India is an evolving, fast-growing country, with a huge market eager to adopt new things and a pleasantly rising GDP per capita. Soon enough, the outputs of places like the IITs will not be tempted to seek their fortunes a hemisphere away from everything they know because the opportunities and the quality of life will be plenty good enough at home. The government has begun to step in to assist in that realization (I don’t know much about this; please post any links you may have on the subject). The smart people will stay at home, benefiting the places that put forth the resources to educate them, and the US will lose a big source of its brains/innovation/growth.

Once things begin to slow down around here, I am quite confident that the freaking out will begin - and that is when education will once again be a priority in America.