I find it disheartening that during the current “three-ring-circus” of presidential campaigns, that the topic of education reform is rarely discussed. Every candidate, of course, is focusing their debates about what to they would like to do about the war, the economy, the environment, and a number of other frightening ghouls that haunt the American dream at night. Although drastic times do call for drastic measures, and the immediate situation does need immediate assistance, I think that it’s also important to plan for the future. The ultimate weapon against conflicts, famine, and even the destruction of our environment is education.
The FASFA (short for the Free Application For Federal Student Aid) is required do be filled out and submitted by all students who seek federal student aid for college. It is also used by most states to determine what kind of state level student aid a student is eligible for. The FASFA questions how much money a student has made in the last year. If the student is under 25 years old, it also asks about the student’s parents’ incomes from the previous year. This information is used to determine how much the family in question is expected to financially contribute towards the student’s college education. If the student’s parents have made too much money in the previous year, the student is not eligible for federal grants.
One problem with this system is that most people in America are not their parents’ financial dependents on through to the age of 25. It’s common for children to leave their parents nests at 18, soon after high school. Many young Americans receive absolutely no financial help from their parents at that point, and are being penalized, through this system, by their parents’ incomes. The FASFA asks for numerous bits of IRS tax information, but completely ignores whether or not the student is a legal dependent. If a student is not a legal dependent, what difference should it make as to whether their parent is Oliver Twist* or Donald Trump?
*It was really hard to think of a famous poor person by the way, so I ended up using Oliver Twist, who started off poor, but ended up rich and is a fictional character.
Another problem with this system is that the middle class (who collectively are the primary tax contributors, and thus are the ones who actually pay for these programs) gets screwed. Through this system, a poor family’s kids get most of their education paid for, a rich family has no problem affording college for their kids, and the middle class kids get to go to work, to pay taxes for the poor kids to get free education.
The reason for this discriminatory system is, as always, money. This system forces the majority of the population (all those middle class kids) into the workplace, where they can contribute taxes back to the government. It also attempts to break the chains of lower class families’ habits of living off government assistance generation after generation, so that they too can eventually pay taxes.
If I were the Emperor of the United States I would nurture the American dream by making available the educational tools required for its citizens to achieve their highest potentials. Right now our government has several traps in place to keep the common man down and the rich man rich. The FASFA is just one of them. It dictates that a citizen’s family background is still a very important factor in who “deserves” to go to college. If this country made higher education free to all citizens that have the aptitude and drive to pursue it, then yes, the social classes would change, but in a more natural way. This country would contain more citizens doing the things that they want to do and are good at. Of coarse we will always need the laborers, janitors, and factory workers to maintain our country, but who is working those positions should not be influenced by government policy. A higher education is becoming more and more necessary for the common man to thrive in today’s world of information highways. It’s also crucial for our citizens to be well educated if our country is to compete well with the rest of the world. I, for one, would be willing to cut funding on bombs to pay for books. If our country was to truly provide the opportunity for Americans to pursue their dreams through higher education, then the American dream would no longer be a dream, it would be a reality.
George Carlin on “the American Dream”
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