As students, the part of our country’s budget we are immediately concerned with is educational spending. When funding to higher education is cut, we feel the effect of it pretty quickly. Our fees and tuition go up, which puts an even greater strain on ourselves and our families to come up with the money to keep us here. Stereotypically as a group, students are broke. And let’s face it: college isn’t cheap. To do well these days we need that diploma.

For our parents’ generation it was feasible to get a job after high school and manage to support a family well enough. It was easier with a college degree, but people still did all right. These days, though, especially with the economy the way it is, competition for jobs is high and most employers won’t even look at you if you don’t have a college diploma.

Every year we see the government lop off another portion of the funds allocated to education in an effort to help balance out the budget. But if we want to be able to continue to compete on a global level, education should be one of the last places to feel the pinch. Cutting educational funding, while it may create spare change short-term, will do nothing but develop into a vicious cycle in the long run.

It is said that children are the future of this country.

Well if that’s true, we’re looking at a pretty bleak horizon because if the schools can’t afford to teach people what we need to know to compete with the rest of the world or if they can’t afford to pay to learn it, we will as a nation just keep falling further behind.

America became as powerful as it is today because for a long time we were largely self-sufficient. We were at the forefront of scientific and technological breakthroughs, but we’re starting to lose our momentum. We cannot afford to ride on our predecessor’s coattails forever because the day will come when we are expected to pick up the reigns and take charge. We won’t be stable for long if we have to outsource all the jobs we can’t perform to other countries.

The economy is not what it was ten years ago, there’s no two ways about it. We keep hearing promises from politicians that if we elect such and such a person they will create more jobs, cut taxes and somehow the money for all this will magically appear.

Not gonna happen.

So when the taxman comes a knockin’, we need to make sure he invests our money wisely in things like education that will pay off down the road, not just on quick fixes and snake oil cures that leave them reaching deeper into our pockets when the next round of voting comes along. There’s no surer investment for a country’s coffers than the citizens themselves.

Molly Cahill is a senior prejournalism major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at [email protected].