Student financial Aid bill

[hhope1]

Hi,

Did anyone see that congress failed to pass that bill increasing the pell grant another five hundred dollars? I was so about it. I know I've only got another year or so left of college but it is unbelieveable that the government refuses to keep up with the increasing cost of attending college. They are making so many cuts in financial aid, I think the country is going to end up with a lot of college dropouts just cause we can't pay for our own education.

[cool]

Hope: I feel for ya... that's the prob with governments.

They are more likely to spend money on defence or war machines or buy things that destroy than to spend them wisely like education.

USA spends $450 billion last year on defence, more than the entire world's defense budget.

just 10% of that can pay for every person's education in the USA.

[hhope1]

Wow, ten percent huh?

I've heard that a lot of European countries pay students to go to college, not like we do it here. On the downside it can be really hard to get into any college period over there, because the competition is so fierce.

If we could just find a nice balance here between paying to go and getting paid to go to college that would be great. Did that make sense? :?

[cool]

I went to Iowa State University and I think the cost to attend per year would be about $10,000.00 (I am using a medium college fees because we can't pay for people to go to ivy league schools).

So, let's play some math games.

1 million students would cost about $10 Billion dollars / annually.

I am not sure how many students there are in America, but if we assume that 4 million students attend college every year, then that would cost about $40 billion dollars even if the government provide FREE education.

That's about 10% of the US defense budget.

Let's do another math. Costs to go to schools in 3rd world countries would cost about $200/year (note, this is cost per student / year for school level studies).

Now, with 40 billion dollars, America could actually provide schooling to 200 million people in 3rd world countries. Now, don't you think that's money well spent??

Would you vote for a government that says, ok, we'll cut down our defense budget by 10% to provide education to 200 million people??

[hhope1]

Yes I would. As it is I think our defense budget is too inflated and during the war in Iraq the president just kept asking congress for more and more money. Do you know that our missile defense program could end up costing us more than $100 billion just to maintain?