School is where everything starts. Innovation, creativity, progress — these things cannot happen without a strong and broad education, one that offers challenges and opportunities. Whether you want to change the world or just comfortably succeed in it, you need a good education first. And in our modern America, that includes a college degree — once an option, today a virtual necessity.
It stands to reason, then, that our government, created and sustained to protect and benefit the success and happiness of its citizens, would prioritize education for its children and young adults and ensure the country’s education system is spared the bitter, uncertain politics of its usual functioning. But on March 1, Congress failed to do this, letting $3 billion of education spending be automatically cut as part of the budget sequestration, and in doing so, endangered our future as collateral of its political games.
Of this $3 billion, the UM System will likely lose $25 million of its budget for fiscal year 2013. This is in three primary categories: research funding (for which MU will bear $11.5 million in cuts), health system support and financial aid for students.
The $11.5 million in estimated cuts to research funding at MU is extremely damaging. [This has been a banner year for MU research](https://www.themaneater.com/stories/2013/1/25/mus-vibrant-research-activities-deserve-more-recog/), and these devastating cuts — which come via lost funding for federal agencies and departments, such as the National Institutes for Health and the Department of Agriculture, that provide research grants to MU faculty and graduate students — will jeopardize, strain or end many research projects at the university.
This has several short- and long-term consequences. Not only will a weakened research program make it tougher to attract and retain top-tier faculty and graduate students and decrease the amount of positive attention the university gets, it will stunt the progress of scientific exploration and innovation that is made possible by this funding. For example, [groundbreaking research on prostate cancer treatment](https://www.themaneater.com/stories/2012/10/26/mu-researchers-utilize-gold-nanoparticles-prostate/) may not continue in the face of NIH cuts. MU will lose $1.3 million from the Department of Defense that helped fund research on applied nanotechnology for national defense. The $11.5 million on paper is tough, but may be minuscule compared to the long-term cost of cutting the vital research that MU faculty and students carry on each day.
The financial aid cuts are especially abhorrent in the face of ceaselessly rising tuition rates. An estimated 1,166 UM System students will lose federal work-study benefits this year, and 2,000 UM students will lose Supplemental Education Opportunity Grants — in fact, Pell grants are the only type of federal financial aid protected from the sequester.
In the past few decades, it has become increasingly tough for lower- and middle-class students to pay for college. Congress eliminating the grants, loans and work-study opportunities many of these students rely on to achieve their dreams of a college degree is a cold slap in the face. It is even more insulting because the sequestration, set as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, was created artificially, as an unwanted “last resort” for Congress to motivate itself to act. Apparently, the thought of hundreds of thousands of lower-income students losing the ability to pay for a vital college education (among all the other critical cuts of the package) was not enough to persuade Congress to set aside its ego and petty political posturing.
Perhaps the worst part of the sequestration cuts is how little it actually achieves. Like the rest of the negotiations and deadlines Congress has set and squabbled over for the past several years — the “fiscal cliff,” the “debt ceiling,” the Bush tax cuts expiration — it’s just a short-term fix that kicks the deeper problems of federal spending down the road. We, the next leaders of the United States, will be the ones who eventually have to fix this on a grander, more critical scale. Why, then, is Congress cutting our education without much of a thought? They should at least provide us with the opportunity to gain the skills and knowledge necessary to grapple with the calamitous problems they have methodically built and will soon leave for us.
It’s also terribly disappointing to see these cuts after the victory of last spring’s More For Less campaign, in which MU and other university students successfully persuaded the Missouri general assembly and Gov. Jay Nixon to take state higher-education cuts off the table. Unfortunately, education lobbyists could not achieve the same kind of results in Washington, D.C. — not when they’re competing with large corporations, Super PACs and Grover Norquist. As a result, educators and students across the country will shoulder a greater burden for fewer opportunities. Although $3 billion may be a drop in the federal-budget bucket, our representatives failed to recognize the true gravity of what these education cuts truly entail.
Is a balanced budget the No. 1 goal of our society? Must our leaders prioritize austerity over opportunity, penny-pinching over progress? We fervently disagree. Not when there is so much to be gained from keeping our education system strong. Not when our country and our world so badly need bright young thinkers and doers. Congressional budget hawks may be proud of this federal belt-tightening, but everyone will pay the cost of these myopic cuts, both in 2013 and for decades to come.
