Academic budgets.

As of October 24, 2005, Tulane University announced, as a response to Hurricane Katrina, that it would eliminate the jobs of 243 full-time employees, a mix of professional and support positions, but no faculty jobs. As of December 12, this plan was considerably broadened with the announcement cutting four of Tulane's six engineering programs and 230 faculty members, 65 of whom are tenured Ironically, one of the dismissed professors had just had a federal grant approved that would study watersheds around New Orleans and help explain how they function during a hurricane. For more information, see www.insidehighered.com for October 25 and December 12, 2005.

At an academic forum in September, 2005, the chancellor at the University of Wisconsin said that during the years after World War II, the United States built the world's greatest system of public higher education, which is now being dismantled. Taxpayer support for public universities has plunged more precipitously since 2001 than at any time in the past two decades. The share of all public universities' revenues deriving from state and local taxes declined to 64 percent in 2004 from 74 percent in 1991. A number of university presidents are calling this decline a de facto privatization of the institutions that played such a crucial role in the creation of the American middle class (The New York Times, October 16, 2005).

New York City child care providers were informed by a city official that the city's massive new after-school child care initiative would pay less than needed and expect service providers to seek private funding. This announcement marked the first time the city has articulated what previously had been a quiet shift from public to private funding of the city's after-school budget (www.CityLimits.org, December 12, 2005).

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the federal government can deduct money from Social Security checks to cover long overdue student loan debts. Since many of these loans were taken out twenty to thirty years ago, their recipients now are often in their sixties and dependent upon Social Security (Chronicle of Higher Education, December 8, 2005).

In "The War on Our Children" (In These Times, December 19, 2005), Representative Pete Stark(D-California) writes that the Iraq War and the tax breaks given to the wealthiest Americans have placed almost impossible hurdles in front of our children. Since 2002, nearly 7,000 Head Start slots for low-income families have been cut. The next targets are poor mothers with children under six years old. These mothers would have to double their work hours from 20 to 40 hours to remain eligible for vocational training, yet not gain the $10.5 billion needed for the additional childcare When children reach school age they will be subjected to No Child Left Behind, which has shortchanged public schools by $40 billion as of June, 2005. If they reach college, students could be forced to pay an additional $5,800 for college. The U.S. has spent $250 billion for the Iraq War and will give American millionaires an average tax break of $41, 574 in 2006. These funding priorities may be costing American students their futures.

As Congress moves to slash $40 billion in spending, the college loan program will be hardest hit, with almost $13 billion cut over the next five years The money taken from the student loan program would not be pumped into other education programs, but counted only toward reducing the federal deficit (Associated Press, December 21, 2005).