Higher Education Day Draws Big Crowd At State House
You can always count on Higher Education Day to bring a crowd to the State House.
Students want lawmakers to give our 14 public universities the money they need.
“We aren’t given the opportunities we need to really branch out and become better students, so I think that they should fund us, fund our schools and fund all the universities so we can give more back to our communities and give more back to our state,” said Frank Gayle, a student at ASU.
Gordon Stone is the Executive Director of the Higher Education Partnership.
He says it’s important to fully fund colleges. They’re looking for a third of the education budget. Right now they receive about 27%.
“Unfortunately over the last 6 years we’ve seen the percentage of taxes that go to our universities at 3%. That’s way down. Just look at some of our neighbors. Kentucky is at 21%. So we can do better in that regard,” said Stone.
State lawmakers like Sen. Arthur Orr got in front of the crowd to show the students that their voices are being heard.
Governor Robert Bentley even delayed a trip to Washington D.C. just to make sure he could be here again.
He proposed a very small increase for higher education, but it still comes out to about 27% of the education budget.
“This is very important to me, it really is. I’ve got a lot of higher education, I paid for a lot of it. It is expensive. That is a problem that we have in this state and we need to do everything we can to lower the cost of tuition,” said Gov. Bentley.
