Alaskan student walking to class
Sian Gonzales found out he would no longer be receiving the almost $5,000 he has been awarded annually from the Alaska Performance Scholarship (APS) on July 9 — a month and a half shy of the first day of classes for his junior year at the University of Alaska, Anchorage.
Gonzales, 21, didn’t lose the scholarship money because his grades slipped or because he violated any school rules; instead, Gonzales and 2,500 other students in Alaska lost the scholarship because the state is no longer funding it.
“I’m scared,” Gonzales, a nursing student, told NBC News. Raised in Juneau, Gonzales decided to stay in Alaska for college in large part because of the APS, and even worked toward earning the scholarship during high school.
“Alaska is in dire need of nurses. After I graduate, I want to use my skills to help my people here in Alaska. I want to stay in Alaska” Gonzales said. And that’s exactly what the APS was created to do.
The dumbing down of America has been going on for several generations, and it seems that this is just an extreme example. Which is so very sad, because this country has produced such innovation – it’s gutting the very thing that has made America a once great country. We have a regime and president right now that are not only anti-science, and anti-intellectual, so of course it is also anti-education. I might add that it has been demonstrated that there are certain things that happen with any fascist regime, whether it was Nazi Germany, Iran’s theocracy, or the Taliban: the intellectuals and the artists are driven out or executed, the rights of women are immediately withdrawn, and education becomes extremely limited and based on indoctrination.
I’m not sure it’s so simple. I did my undergrad and graduate studies in California, and witnessed the cost of tuition go up every year, even doubling and tripling for community college. As the prices went up, the quality of services for students decreased. It isn’t clear to me why the education system has become so much more expensive in the last ten years that I attended college, but I can say for sure that more money isn’t going to fix the problem. This isn’t to say that grants to students should be taken away, but I just want to point out that the colleges themselves are also a part of the problem, so please don’t throw all the blame towards the side of the aisle you hate, because it seems to be coming from all sides as far as I can tell.