Preventative Health Measures for College Students

The Blue Bonnet Opinion posted an editorial over the new law that will require current college students under the age of 30 to receive a meningitis shot before attending school (The Blue Bonnet Opinion, TradingFreedom for Security?, November 29, 2011). This law will target college students attending private 4-year universities, public 4-year universities, as well as community college students (National Conference of State Legislatures, MeningitisLegislation and State Laws, April 2011). While Reyes believes that getting the shot is up to each person, I say give everyone the shot.

Quite honestly, I don't think that adding another vaccination to the list of vaccinations we already have to receive from elementary to high school will create a large burden on individuals. I always think it's better to be safe than sorry. While I agree with the comment that Reyes made that the disease is rare, why risk your chances?

College is a petri dish of germs and diseases. Since most students live on campus, much of the personal space they once had back at home is pretty much gone. Even if someone isn't a dirty person, who is to say that your roommate isn't going to have the same clean habits as yourself? Living with thousands of students can create lots of problems if the proper action is not taken. Especially at such a young age where couples kiss, and students share drinks, meningitis and other contagious diseases can pose a problem in the long run if let out of hand.

While I do agree that everyone has different beliefs about the shot, I see it as a flu shot. You take a vaccine in the hopes of not getting sick later on in the year while everyone else does. It's more of a preventative measure than a statement of dominance.

Of course, there's always the problem of being able to afford this vaccine. With the research I've done over this new law (City Town Info, Meningitis Vaccination Law In Texas Creates Problems For Some Students, November 28, 2011), the state is willing to allow those individuals without insurance to get them at low cost, or even free, at health departments and clinics. However, not much information has yet been released regarding how to do so. I'm sure that once the time gets closer, news stations everywhere will begin to release that information. 

The Argument for Merit Pay

I’m quite fond of the idea that Texas should use a merit pay system for teachers. For quite a while, I've wished that teachers would be hired due to how well they teach as opposed to just carrying a degree. Over the years, I've encountered several teachers that don't really like to teach or just don't know how to do so in an efficient manner.

With the sudden downturn in Texas' economy recently, the education department has been hurt quite a lot. At my former school, many great teachers had been fired because other teachers had seniority. If Texas focuses on seniority alone, some teachers may become lazy after several years and resort to teaching methods that may not be the most useful to students while it may be to them. Without calling names, I knew a teacher that would have important test grades on the syllabus but would sometimes put it off or not do the assignment at all if they didn’t feel like grading afterwards. This to me only reinforces to students that it’s okay to not to important things or to put them off for a long time. It doesn’t teach the future generations the importance of deadlines and how much it will affect them once they start to work in the real world.

If merit pay was implemented, teachers would focus on improving their teaching techniques and making sure that students fully understood the material they had to learn. This would also help school districts throughout Texas to keep the best teachers that know how to deliver the required information. If the best teachers were kept, then most students would know more about the courses they've taken from elementary all the way to high school and beyond. This would force teachers to actually pay attention to the students that don’t quite understand the material.

While this may create grade obsessed teachers, it will provide an incentive. Teachers should be paid accordingly to how well they know how to teach. Aside from having had a handful of not so great teachers in my life thus far, I do know several that deserved to get paid more than they currently were. Some teachers really care about the future of their students’ lives, and to me that creates a high level of respect towards the teacher. Teachers that actually care about making a difference in a young person’s life are the ones that matter the most and should be paid more and kept in the work force than the ones that don’t know how to make a difference.

Helping Those In Need

In Lawful Texan's editorial over immigration and tuition laws in Texas (Perry rightly defends tuition program!!!, October 30, 2011), Sherrell states that she doesn't believe in Rick Perry's idea of helping out the immigrants in Texas by allowing them to pay in-state tuition rates. I'll be quite honest from the start, I disagree.

Most incoming illegal college students didn't choose to come to the United States on their own. As a matter of fact, their parents did. Quite honestly, I find it unfair to those individuals who have lived in the US for a large part of their lives to pay tuition rates of an international or out-of-state student when their parents have been paying taxes the entire time they've been living in the state of Texas. These taxes may come in all shapes and forms, such as the sales tax which everyone pays while buying products anywhere in the state of Texas.

I don't particularly believe it's fair to those students who managed to make outstanding grades in high school to be denied the chance of attending college just based on documentation they don't have. To offer an in-state tuition rate to those individuals would really open doors for them to continue studying, obtain a legal status, get a degree, and then get a job that will help the economy grow in the future. What this country needs now more than ever are qualified and skilled individuals to take the economy one step further than the previous generations have done so.

While entering the United States illegally isn't the best of choices, the fact is that many illegal students don't really have a say as to whether they do or not. Many illegal parents are faced with tough choices in leaving their home nation to pursue a better future, not for themselves, but for their children and their children's children. As an immigrant myself, I know that it must have been difficult for my parents to leave the nation they were born in knowing that they would most likely never see their family ever again just to offer my brother and I a chance of having a brighter future. This brighter future consists of attending college, and if Perry will allow immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates, then God bless him. Immigrants usually have to take the lowest paying jobs just to survive, and with ridiculously high tuition rates, attending college for most immigrants would be nearly impossible.

Should We Occupy?

A topic that has been bothering me for the past few days are these “Occupy ______” protests that seem to be happening in many large cities of the United States (and random cities around the world too). While I’m totally in favor of protesting and getting your opinion heard, I find these protests in particular a bit disappointingly useless. Of course, this is when my inner moral voice starts asking me, “Don’t you want corruption to end?” and while I may say yes, I highly doubt corruption will stop. Let me explain.

United States was created on a capitalist economy. Thus, it seems a bit unfair to me to take away the money of select individuals just because they have more money than most protestors combined. If this nation is based on a capitalist economy, wouldn’t it be fair for those individuals that might or might not have worked hard to make such large amounts of money in their life to keep it? I think most financial issues in this country and in the state of Texas are based on the average individual’s inability to come up with a financial plan and to not bite off more than they can chew. I’ll admit that inflation keeps raising prices pretty much globally and that can make purchasing goods more expensive such as grocery shopping. However, it doesn’t mean everyone has to have the latest phone or the latest gadget if that means suffering financially. I would hope that the past and present recession would’ve taught this nation that people should be rational as to what they can or can’t afford. So to me, the inability to not spend and save your money seems to also be another underlying cause of this huge gap of income that’s present these days. Increases in population also contribute greatly to the elite’s income. The more people buy, the more money they’ll end up having. While corruption is rampant, there would have to be significant amounts of evidence in order to take any of these wealthy people to trial.

I will admit I still feel a bit confused about all of these protests. It seems everywhere I’ve seen protests, they protest against so many things. All the noise created from these protests creates much confusion and it gets to a point where I end up asking myself, what in the world are they even protesting against? Corruption? Greed? The fundamental economic system by which this nation was created? Their inability to not bite off more than they can chew and then blame their debt on others? The Health Care Reform? Terrorism? The lack of jobs? High rents? Inflation? I know this nation has problems and people don’t have jobs, but when the main focus doesn’t seem concise, that’s when I start to get a bit bothered. As optimistic as I wish I could be with these protests, I highly doubt the wealthy will voluntarily give their excess money to the masses. No one can end corruption and greed. It’s a vicious cycle. Once someone from the 99% enters the 1%, unfortunately the lure of money will convert them into the same individuals they once protested against.

The only way to help end these people’s outrage would be by creating more jobs. However, with a split Congress, it’ll be difficult to pass any law. As already seen, the Republican majority in the House of Representatives already voted against the Job Reform President Obama wanted to pass. Thankfully Texas has been able to keep jobs and create several more in order to help feed more families with a disposable income. One can only hope other states will be able to provide people with more jobs as well.

Austin City Council Increasing Election Spending

The latest in Austin news is that the Austin City Council decided to do what they wanted. Who's surprised by politicians getting the last word? I'm not. Blue Dot Blues' writer MJ Samuelson wrote about how the city council refused to change the council elections to November 2012 instead of May of the same year. (MJ Samuelson. Austin City Council actively disenfranchising voters. Blue Dot Blues. Tuesday, October 11, 2011.)

While both Austin ISD and the Austin Community College district agreed that moving the elections to November would be a good idea, the city council thought otherwise. Samuelson believes that the Austin City Council is pretty ridiculous for thinking that leaving the elections in May is anywhere near a good idea. She states that leaving the elections in May would cost the Austin taxpayers around $1.2 million (not including the $500,000 estimated run-off). A different source I checked for research had stated that moving the elections to November would cost about $900,000. I mean, no big deal, right? It's only about a $300,000 difference that could've gone to more important departments, like say, education? But clearly Texas isn't big on the education department nowadays.

Anyways, back to Samuelson. She believes that this may be a way for the city council to protect themselves from "voters [that] aren't smart enough to grasp all the issues on the long general election ballot in November." We all know politicians will do whatever they can to win, so that comes as no surprise to me. They just don't seem to care about how much easier it'll be to inform the public on when elections will be so they can all perform their jobs as responsible citizens. Seems like the only way for uninformed voters to make any change in when elections will be held is by doing what we do best. Protest. If you want your voice heard, make it heard. Samuelson's blog post provides several ways we can all get our voice heard, and hopefully save the state $300,000 and our cars some gas from having to travel to voting sites several times throughout next year.

As far as the research I’ve done on the subject, Samuelson seems to be on track. Her figures match up to those of major newspapers, such as the Austin American Statesman, as well as other Texas based blogs like Empower Texans. Besides, if she’s trying to get Austinites more informed and motivated to change the way politics is working these days in their own city, I’d think she was pretty credible. I completely agree with her, if we want any change, we’ll have to work for it. 

Previous Laws Haunt Perry

Just yesterday, I found an editorial written by Joshua Green on the Austin American Statesman in which he comments on the attack Governor Rick Perry received for having passed a law back in 2001 in regards to tuition and illegal immigrants. The bipartisan law he passed granted illegal immigrants the right to pay in-state tuition so long as they had been living in Texas for at least 3 years and had plans of becoming permanent residents.

Throughout his editorial, Green tries to reach to the audience that might still not be convinced that this law is in reality quite helpful. Green claims that it's actually more useful and beneficial to the state's economy to allow these present and future generations to attend college regardless of immigration status because it already cost millions of dollars to educate these individuals from elementary to high school. To end their educational career right after they finish high school is absurd since many students are capable and deserve to get a higher education. Besides, it'd be best to have an educated population to employ since those higher paying jobs will feed the state's economy in years to come. To support this argument, Green has shown the statistics of the difference in income between those that have a degree as compared to those that don't ($23.40/hour for an individual with a bachelor's degree or higher compared to $12.29 for an individual with a high school diploma).

However, Green did say that Governor Rick Perry had possibly damaged his political career was by saying that he had approved the law because he didn’t want people to think he was “lacking a ‘heart.’” As far as extremist Republicans are concerned, social issues aren’t their concern. As the years have gone by, some (not all) Republicans have become more hostile towards illegal immigrants. This hostility has been shown particularly in the South where the most issues arise from illegal immigration. For Rick Perry to say that he has a “heart” and he wants to help illegal immigrants out in the education department is seen as preposterous to many extremist Republicans.

The way I see it, Green is completely right. I think he is a credible author since he has a reputation of having written well-informed editorials in the past for several well-known papers. I personally don’t think immigration status should deny any individual the universal right to an education. While many will disagree and say that illegals shouldn’t deserve to pay in-state tuition based on the fact that they’re illegal, I find it completely right. They deserve the right because they also participate in the state’s economy by paying their taxes such as sales tax on everything they buy just like legal residents. I also agree that the only way to help the Texas economy to recover is by creating more jobs for skilled workers, but in order to do so, Texas has to educate its citizens to be able to pay them accordingly. Lowering the tuition rate illegals have to pay helps them a lot since they can’t receive financial aid from FAFSA and have to find other means to pay for an education, and with higher tuition rates, it’d be nearly impossible for them to get an education and a degree. Without a degree or an education, they wouldn’t be as helpful to the economy. As for Rick Perry, I can’t say he has completely lost. As time goes by, the Hispanic vote will start to count more and more, and if he manages to maintain a point of view that’s true to his Republican ideals but ever-so-slightly moderate, he may be able to attract some of the Hispanic votes by reeling them in. 

Budget Cuts Cutting Into Higher Education

While looking for an article that caught my attention, I wanted to find one that would reach out to my other classmates as well. However, seeing how Rick Perry is dominating pretty much everything that encompasses Texas government, I decided I would pick something a bit different instead of following his presidential campaign.

I found an article in The Texas Tribune that had come out about a month ago, but is going to be very relevant information for college students in the years to come. So what's the topic? College education and how the bills passed by the Texas Legislature will shape most college students' futures.

The Texas Tribune began on the first of August a series of articles called "31 Days, 31 Ways" that reviewed all the changes Texas residents would begin to face the first of September due to the passing of these bills. Now we all know that tuition is already a handful unless you're one of the lucky few that don’t have to worry about how their college education will be paid. (I wish I was fortunate enough to say I was one of the lucky ones, alas, I am not.) The article said that financial aid funding would begin to diminish. That means financial aid programs ranging from TEXAS Grants to the Top 10 Percent Scholarships will experience many reductions. At least 15% of the funding that these programs received once upon a time will no longer be available to many students.

Again, as I’ve stated, while this article wasn’t released a couple of days ago, I think the information is incredibly relevant to many students such as myself. I encourage anyone pursing a college education to take a read to be prepared and know how these Texas bills will affect us all.

(I included a link to the “31 Days, 31 Ways” series page in case anyone was interested in checking out the changes that will begin to happen based on the many decisions Texan lawmakers have made.)