Gov. Bob McDonnell (R-VA)

Most higher education administrators declined to criticize the governor, but a handful have spoken out against the plan. They noted that the measure would likely have the opposite effect from the one McDonnell intends, making college more expensive, particularly for low-income students.

“Given that tuition has been for some time used as a source to meet the financial need of students, the university sees the language in the introduced budget as likely to have unintended consequences in terms of the net price and affordability for student and families as well as on the capacity of higher education institutions of the Commonwealth to meet the objectives of the Higher Education Opportunity Act,” said Michael Strine, executive vice president and chief operating officer at the University of Virginia.

In the last ten years, “tuition prices at Virginia institutions doubled on average.” McDonnell’s plan also comes at a time when aid for higher education at the federal level is being cut, even as student debt levels continues to break and then re-break records each year.

“It’s no wonder President Obama wants every kid go to go college,” Santorum said Wednesday in Florida, according to CBS News. “The indoctrination that occurs in American universities is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America. And it is indoctrination. If it was the other way around, the ACLU would be out there making sure there wasn’t one penny of government dollars going to colleges and universities, right?”

Actually, universal access to higher education is about building a stronger economy. The United States used to have the world’s highest percentage of college graduates, but we’ve plummeted to 14th in recent decades, as more and more younger Americans eschew the degrees that earlier generations pursued. According to the National Center on Public Policy and Education, just 35 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds were enrolled in some form of higher education in 2008, compared to more than 50 percent of South Koreans.

And its no secret that those with higher degrees earn more. According to the Lumina Foundation, “Since 1975, the average earnings of high school dropouts and high school graduates fell in real terms (by 15 percent and 1 percent, respectively) while those of college graduates rose by 19 percent.” In 2009, the median annual income of a young college-educated person was $45,000 while a young person with just a high school diploma made $21,000.

Santorum may see this as indoctrination, but those earning more, spending more in the economy, and raising their quality of life through higher education, likely see their degree as something worth having.

Murphy plays Dr. Tom Buckley, an assistant professor who works with famed hoax debunker Dr. Margaret Matheson (Weaver). As their departmental budget crumbles and they lose ground to Dr. Shackleton (Toby Jones), a “parapsychologist” who believes in paranormal phenomena, Tom pushes Margaret both to take on a pair of student research assistants, sexy Sally (a woefully underused Elizabeth Olsen) and Ben, and to investigate a famous blind psychic, Simon Silver (Robert DeNiro). As the pair proceed, they’re plagued by creepy phone calls, birds flying into windows fast enough to kill themselves, and mysteriously bent spoons. Ultimately, Silver agrees to undergo trials run by the friendly Dr. Shackleton with Tom as an observer, and as the results are released, Tom confronts him at a show in a packed theater.

When the movie explores the horrors of academia, all is well. No self-respecting university would put this much muscle behind paranormal research, but no matter. Watching Margaret make a fool of Shackleton by beating his tests is tremendous fun, even if it doesn’t do any good. “There only way they could make it clearer they don’t want us is a marching band,” Tom grumbles as their position relative to Shackleton’s erodes further. Later, he forces Shackleton to at least let him observe Silver’s trials, shoving him up against a wall and screaming “I want to be on that committee, Shackleton! Don’t give me more excuses! Just do it!” Silly stuff, but it conveys some of the desperation of being shut out. I can imagine graduate students struggling to keep their funding will empathize. Ultimately, it’s Sally and Ben who make a critical discovery, rather than Tom, and their revelation turns out not to matter very much anyway. While I won’t reveal it, Tom ends up meeting a more dramatic fate that suggests whatever time and money he spent on his PhD may have been a waste. Academia has rarely looked worse.

Red Lights is also, briefly, a promising movie about doubt that brings some novel perspectives to common decisions. “If I thought there was something else, I’d turn off all that crap and let my son go,” Margaret says of her son, who has spent years in a coma in an interesting inversion of the rationalist’s approach to brain death. Other times, it’s less convincing: at one point, Tom compares acupuncture and homeopathy to belief in the paranormal despite the fact that the former is in use by military doctors. It’s a weird little slip that suggests the movie isn’t very serious about the line between hoax and scientific validation. And the movie’s twist ending ultimately undermines any commitment or rigor the movie has to the ideas it spends much of its time exploring.

It’s a perfect example of reaching for something more than human and coming away with junk. It’s too bad Rodrigo Cortés, who wrote and directed Red Lights, didn’t trust Tom and Margaret to be interesting enough on their own.

Maybe he would have done none of those things had he lived, out of denial or a lack of capability. But his death forecloses an opportunity, however slight, to make recompense, and to remind the students who still saw him as a deity that there are more important things than football.

Beshear’s assessment of his own budget is, unfortunately, correct. The budget makes $286 million in cuts, including a 6.4 percent cut to a higher education system that has been plagued by funding cuts and rising tuition for years. And though it attempts to preserve K-12 education funding, it will result in less spending on Kentucky’s students and schools, the Lexington Herald-Leader reports:

Although the main funding formula for K-12 schools wouldn’t be cut, population growth means spending per student would decline. Also, education officials say the current year’s population estimate was low, resulting in a cut of more than $50 million to that funding formula.

At the same time, the $43 million tax break Kentucky approved for a Bible-themed amusement park — which will include a 500-foot by 75-foot reproduction of Noah’s Ark — could go into effect for the first time under Beshear’s budget. In addition, the budget includes $11 million to improve a highway interchange near the park. Proponents of the park, Beshear included, have claimed it will boost tourism and create jobs, but those assumptions are based on a report done by the park’s developers.

While Beshear’s budget isn’t guaranteed to pass as proposed, it will likely go through mostly unchanged. Unfortunately, that means lawmakers could jeopardize Kentucky’s substantial gains in K-12 education and ensure ballooning tuition rates at its colleges and universities, all while they preserve tax breaks for what critics have dubbed the “Ark Park.”

Under the Michigan 2020 Plan, Michigan’s high school graduates will be eligible for free tuition at one of Michigan’s community colleges or universities, where the median tuition level is currently around $9,575 per year. The program will be funded entirely by eliminating $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes and putting that money towards students:

“Study after study after study has emphasized the importance of a highly educated workforce in the economic vitality of any state in the 21st century,” said Senate Democratic leader Gretchen Whitmer, D-East Lansing.

Michigan currently pays out roughly $34 billion in tax credits. Under the Michigan 2020 Plan recently unveiled, $3.5 billion in tax credits and loopholes would be eliminated. Democrats put the tuition proposal’s cost at least at $1.8 billion. [...]

Under the plan, graduates who spent their entire K-12 years in Michigan schools would be eligible for the full award, which equates to the median tuition level of all public universities — currently $9,575 per year. Those who attended school for awhile outside the state would get a percentage of that amount.

College tuition has tripled in the last 30 years and is only trending upwards. Indeed, college price tags could get as high as $422,000 come 2034. And with student loans increasingly hard to find in a restricted credit market, families could certainly use the help in sending their children to a college close by.

What’s more, Michigan Senate Democrats note that the elimination of $3.5 billion in tax loopholes is only a 10 percent reduction in the tax credits the state already doles out. In fact, the program costs almost exactly as much as the $1.7 billion tax cut Snyder implemented for corporations.

The plan should appeal to Republicans as “it can be done without raising taxes one cent,” said Whitmer. “It’s not about whether Michigan can afford to do this, it’s whether we can afford not to.”

Democrats have continually tweaked the bill to try to garner Republican support. Last year, the bill stipulated that students who were undocumented immigrants and spent at least three years in a Colorado high school could pay in-state tuition but would be “ineligible for a Colorado stipend granted to legal in-state tuition residents.” Sen. Angela Giron (D) said she hopes Republicans support the bill with the additional changes, explaining that the state can’t wait to enact it:

“None of us want to create an underclass of people,” Giron said. “The state can’t afford that, and this country can’t afford a permanent underclass. They’re here. Let’s make the most of it.”

The new bill differs from last year’s because it includes an option for colleges to refuse to participate. Giron said the caveat was added to appeal to Republicans who opposed the plan last year. [...] She hopes Republicans who viewed the proposal last year as a reward and an incentive for illegal immigration will rethink their positions.

“The census show people that this is an issue that they at least have to pay attention to and take more seriously,” Giron said. “We need to look at the population in our state and across this country. It affects who we elect in what they support.”

Republicans have argued that allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition would incentivize illegal immigration. “Are we teaching a new generation that it’s OK not to follow the laws of our country?” state Rep. Robert Ramírez (R) said in 2011. He voted no in 2011 on the tuition bill.

So far, about a dozen states allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at colleges. In Georgia, state Rep. Alisha Thomas Morgan (D) said she plans to introduce similar legislation during the Georgia legislature’s 2012 session.

Today, New Hampshire voters will select their preferred Republican standard bearer in the GOP presidential primary. But when it comes to economic policy and concern for the 99 Percent, the voters don’t have much of a choice, as the candidates are largely in lockstep. And that is doubly true when it comes to student debt, even as the candidates hope for a win in the state that carries the nation’s largest student debt load, as the Ticket’s Liz Goodwin noted:

New Hampshire college students graduate with the highest average debt in the country: a staggering $31,048 for the class of 2010, according to a report by the Project on Student Debt. And tuition at the state’s public universities is among the highest in America, an average of more than $23,000 a year…Many of [the GOP candidates] have not yet gone into detail about their ideas for the country’s education system. But one issue unites most of the Republicans: getting the federal government out of education, which includes government loans to students.

In addition to having no solutions for record student debt loads, many of the GOP candidates want to dismantle the federal student loan program entirely, calling it an “absurdity” and a “total failure.” When President Obama announced a new plan to forgive some student loan debt, Newt Gingrich derided it as a “Ponzi scheme.”

The Roosevelt Institute’s Mike Konczal has some good ideas for grappling with student debt, including mass refinancing of all student loans “into the current low rates the financial sector enjoys.” But even in the state that is buried under the most student debt, the Republican candidates have provided little in terms of solutions.

That’s an increase of 111 percent and 167 percent, respectively, from the average class of 2012 tuition:

New moms and dads with visions of Ivy League degrees dancing in their heads should be prepared to face a bill of $422,320 in today’s dollars if Junior heads off to one the country’s priciest colleges as a member of the class of 2034.

If college costs keep rising as they have for the last three decades, the inflation-adjusted price of four years of tuition alone will more than double at private colleges and nearly triple at public universities by the time a baby born this year is ready to enroll, an analysis by The Daily shows.

Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Cost Project, notes that public universities in particular have been relying on tuition increases to boost revenue and offering less financial aid.

The Daily points out that tuition increases wouldn’t be so bad if family incomes were keeping pace. But they aren’t, as “in real terms, the incomes of families with at least one child under age 18 have grown only about 1 percent since 1987.” Those bleak trends mean that college costs will put even more of a strain on families in the future, and probably result in fewer students being able to receive a college education. For the first time ever, outstanding student loans will exceed $1 trillion this year, and Americans now owe more on student loans than on credit cards.

To many, that would seem an effort to improve America’s lagging educational stature among the world’s largest countries. To former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum (R), however, that is a sign of Obama’s “elitist snobbery.”

While talking about education during a campaign stop in New Hampshire today, Santorum stated that Obama “said every child should go to college,” then declared, “What elitist snobbery out of this man!” The claim drew cheers from many in the crowd.

Watch it:

Santorum explained that if any of his seven children wanted to become an auto mechanic, he would encourage him to do so and to become the best at it. Why he is ardently opposed giving every student a chance to go to college, however, is unclear.

Santorum made similar remarks at an earlier campaign stop at, of all place, St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire, as the Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal both reported.

Keeton had said she believes members of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning population suffer from “identity confusion,” and had expressed interest in attempting to convert students from being homosexual to heterosexual. She also said it would be impossible to separate her views about homosexuality from her clients’ views, and even admitted that if she were a high school counselor, she would tell a sophomore struggling with his sexual orientation that it is not okay to be gay. The court ruled that the cultural sensitivity remediation the school prescribed her so she could learn to work with GLBTQ clients did not constitute viewpoint discrimination, but rather reflected the expectations of the profession:

Every profession has its own ethical codes and dictates. When someone voluntarily chooses to enter a profession, he or she must comply with its rules and ethical requirements.  Lawyers must present legal arguments on behalf of their clients, notwithstanding their personal views.  Judges must apply the law, even when they disagree with it.  So too counselors must refrain from imposing their moral and religious values on their clients.

The Sixth Circuit is hearing a similar case against Eastern Michigan University by a student named Julea Ward. In July 2010, Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed Ward’s suit, saying her dismissal “was entirely due” to her “refusal to change her behavior.” Motivated by Ward’s ongoing case, some Michigan legislators recently proposed legislation that would allow counseling students to decline serving certain clients without jeopardizing their academic success.

Earlier this week, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) urged the Obama administration to ensure equal treatment of LGBT applicants in the financial aid process. “Taxpayer-funded financial aid is often being misallocated based on sexual orientation when it should be based solely on financial need,” Kerry wrote in a letter addressed to Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Indeed, as a result of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), the FAFSA is often unable to count parents, spouses, step-children, and other family members as part of an individual’s application for financial aid. The resulting unequal treatment leads to significant distortions in the allocation of financial aid for applicants who have two mothers or two fathers. As a recent report from the Center for American Progress found, the FAFSA can rob these families of much needed aid to finance applicants’ higher education or could even result in a larger financial aid package to families headed by same-sex couples. LGBT youth and transgender applicants also experience significant barriers to submitting a FAFSA on time, complete, or at all.

For its part, the federal government assigned more than $134 billion in financial aid to more than 14 million students last year, making it the single largest grantee of aid. Since most other financial aid depends on the FAFSA application for federal aid, these distortions will trickle down throughout the entire financial aid application process, even outside of the federal government’s support.

However, the bill does include a cut to the Pell Grant program that could affect up to 100,000 low-income students. Republicans have been pushing for months to slash the Pell Grant program — which provides low-income students with money for higher education — and to limit it’s eligibility requirements. Though the maximum grant will be preserved under the spending deal, students on the edges of eligibility will be out of luck next year:

The bill, HR 3671, draws from ideas put forward in Republican and Democratic spending plans earlier this year: it would preserve the maximum Pell Grant at $5,550, but change the program’s eligibility criteria, making as many as 100,000 of its 9 million recipients ineligible. The grants could be used for a total of 12 semesters, not 18, as in the past — a change that would affect an estimated 62,000 beneficiaries and take effect July 1, 2012. Higher education lobbyists said the limit would apply to any semesters a student was enrolled, rather than only those in which he or she attended full-time, as they had originally thought.

The maximum amount families could earn and automatically contribute nothing toward an undergraduate education would decrease from $30,000 to $23,000.

The plan also retroactively limits the number of semesters that a student can use grants, meaning some students a semester or two away from graduation could see their grants dry up. The Institute for College Access and Success said that these changes “would disproportionately affect black students and transfer students.” The education reform organization Education Trust also criticized the cuts, saying that they “will hit some of America’s most disadvantaged college students the hardest.”

At the same time that Republicans so adamantly opposed a surtax on income in excess of $1 million that Democrats ultimately dropped it from the negotiations, it’s disheartening that one of the few things the two parties could agree on was cutting a program that is key to America’s education competitiveness.

Across the state this week students at seven college campuses will gather to protest what they call a “relentless attack on higher education” by Gov. Rick Scott.

Scott has been a vocal skeptic of the liberal arts emphasis of traditional higher ed. [...] Last month he sent out a lengthy probe out to leaders of all 11 public universities, seemingly asking them to justify themselves by providing information about their costs, programs and graduates’ chosen fields and salaries.

According to the protesters’ press release, “Along with the Florida Legislature, Gov Scott has taken aim at students through countless bills. The tuition of all state universities is poised to rise 15 percent each year for up to a decade.” They also note that the state’s academic scholarship, Bright Futures, is covering less each year, and the program could lose funding all together. Additionally, “this attack on public education comes within the context of an economic downturn affecting hard working middle class Floridian families.”

Florida’s public university system has already seen a 24 percent drop in state funding over the last four years. Yet Scott wants to make more deep cuts to Florida’s public school liberal arts programs, needlessly politicizing academic disciplines and devaluing the skills of millions.

Scott caused an uproar last month when he said the state didn’t need any more anthropology majors, arguing that liberal arts fields should receive less state funding because, he claimed, they don’t help “create jobs” or spur the economy. (Ironically, Scott paid $18,000 a year for his own daughter to major in anthropology in college.)

In March, Scott faced protests from students, teachers, and parents after he unveiled a state budget proposal that slashed $3.3 billion from all levels of schools statewide, which many said would wipe out music, art, and language programs. Education was the main target of Scott’s $5 billion in proposed spending cuts — part of his plan to gut and voucherize public education. Public school officials said his 10 percent cut to education would reduce spending by $703 for each student, cut the average teacher’s salary by $2,335, and result in thousands of teacher layoffs.

By the way, I think I will probably teach a course when I’m president. I think I will probably try to do something that outlines for the whole country what we’re going to try to accomplish, and offer it online sort of like the University of Phoenix or Kaplan. So that way if the country wants, they can sign up. It would be free. Although given the news media’s assumptions about me, oh he’ll probably charge $100 a piece so I can get rich. No! It’ll be free. But the idea would be, why wouldn’t you want a president in the age of social media to methodically in an organized way share with you what they’re going to try to accomplish, so that those people who want to understand it can understand it.

Watch it:

Of course, if Gingrich were truly basing his course on the models set by the University of Phoenix and Kaplan, it wouldn’t be free, but would cost participants an arm-and-a-leg while leaving them with a subpar education.

Bank of America paid nothing in federal taxes in 2009. While earning billions in profit, companies like Boeing, Exxon-Mobil, and Wells Fargo also paid nothing in recent years. Other corporations, like Google and Pfizer, dramatically lower their tax rates by deferring profits they make overseas. After making more than $14 billion in profits last year, General Electric not only got a pass on paying any corporate income taxes, but actually received a tax benefit of $3.2 billion.

Thanks to this propitious tax code, corporations kept $222.7 billion in federal revenue from 2008 to 2010. But the loss of that revenue comes at a cost, a cost being paid by middle class and low-income Americans who are already reeling from a sluggish economy — most notably, students. According to a new report from the National Education Association, $9.8 billion of the lost revenue from corporation would have gone to public schools and colleges over the same period. Those funds would have added over 100,000 jobs in public education and ensured that an extra 400,000 kids living in poverty could enroll in preschool. NEA breaks down that $9.8 billion by the numbers:

– $1,092: The average amount in extra academic support to help 9 million students in poverty catch up to their peers.

– $1,474: The average savings for school districts for each disabled student as a result of greater federal cost sharing.

– $1,276: The average amount in additional financial aid to ensure 7.7 million students in need continue or complete their post-secondary studies.

– 446,655: The number of additional children in poverty enrolled in preschool.

– 126,568: The number of jobs created in the field of education.

With that $9.8 billion, Ohio would have gained 4,363 jobs, Virginia would get 2,794 jobs, Kentucky would have 2,175 jobs, and Arizona would see more 4,094 jobs. Incidentally, these states are also home to Republican leaders in Congress who are singularly dedicated to maintaining this corporate welfare.

As TP Economy editor Pat Garofalo reported, Republican lawmakers continue to aid and abet corporate tax avoidance by protecting offshore profit deferral, which allows corporations to claim domestic tax credits for profits they earn overseas; by proposing to gut the Internal Revenue Service, whose every dollar used to audit tax cheats brings in more than $10 in revenue; by pushing for tax havens in free trade agreements; by enacting repatriation holidays that allow corporations to bring money earned overseas back into the country at a drastically lower rate, even with its negligible effect on job creation; by endorsing taxpayer giveaways like big oil subsidies; and by publicly defending corporate tax dodgers.

Working on behalf of corporations at the expense of American students and families is quickly becoming part of the Republican orthodoxy. This, however, should not be surprising because after all, for Republicans, “corporations are people too.”