Opposing Viewpoints: Subsidies?

When the state gives money to a program, it cannot look at the money as a gift. All of the state's expenditures must be viewed for what they are: an investment. Subsidies for law and medical schools are no exception.

Rather than maintaining the wasteful blanket subsidies that currently cover law and medical schools, the state should provide low-interest loans and grants to students. First off, let's look at the problems involved with the current program of blanket grants and how they could be solved by a grant program.

How many lawyers and doctors are not going to stay in Arizona once they graduate? Arizona is a wonderful, beautiful state. But it is not the most economically robust state in the Union. If the graduates of our law and medical schools want to make money then they would almost certainly leave. Why should the state of Arizona pay for the next generation of California lawyers?

Next, some of the students who enter these schools come from wealthy families. This is not to say that all of the students in them or even many could afford the schools without subsidies, but it is a statistically significant portion of the population. If a student can afford to pay for their schooling, why should the state pay for them?

A well-considered program of loans could eliminate both of these issues and save the state the money it is so concerned about.

Loans could be guaranteed to all students in Arizona graduate schools but with stipulations. Students from wealthy families would not need to take on the loans and would pay the full rate. To encourage students to stay in Arizona, where they will give the state the most benefit, preference will be given to those graduates that stay in-state.

Consider this: in order to give the student a chance to establish herself, the loans would not accumulate interest or require payment for five years. At the end of those five years, if the student is still practicing in Arizona, the loans are forgiven. If she is not, the loan begins to accumulate interest.

In this way, students who cannot afford school without subsidies would still be able to afford school without paying it back, and students who are not returning anything to the state through their services would be able to return something financially.

A compromise like this could give everyone what they want. The state saves money. The students don't pay any more than they already do unless they want to. If we want to, we can make everyone win.

In an effort to forestall a projected deficit in Arizona's fiscal year 2000, State Senator Randall Gnant has proposed doing away with state law school subsidies.

Rather than picking on lawyers the way many of us do when compelled to point out a single source of American culture's ills, Gnant has chosen to eliminate law school subsidies as a first step toward the elimination of all subsidies Arizona university graduate degrees.

His logic? Beyond the bachelor's degree, students are just in it for the money.

I want to argue the issue based on this point. But in order to do so, we have to have a set of assumptions to help us forget about specific cases, arguing then about this more abstract principle.

We must forget that the majority of undergraduates in, for example, business or engineering aren't in it for an education in the theoretical framework that underscores such noble philanthropic pursuits, but for the money. We must also forget that English majors, Anthropology majors and others of this "liberal education" ilk, go on to graduate school without the assurance of fat paychecks at the end of it. Based on this rickety set of implicit assumptions, we arrive at Gnant's conclusion that graduate school is for the big bucks in a way that undergraduate isn't. According to Gnant, graduate students are elites who don't need subsidies.

I disagree. With the amount of undergraduates in the American university system nowadays, a bachelor's degree is about as good as a high school diploma was in our grandparents' day. We need to further our education in order to be competitive. Plus the sheer volume of information that we are expected to know as well as the new requirements like computer program familiarity we must have in order to be job-ready means that the standard four-year college education isn't enough for some of us.

The state faces a possible deficit, say analysts. So it seems the difference between us undergrads and the Joint Legislative Budget Committee - for whom Sen. Gnant was speaking - is that we know what steps to take to make money. Perhaps they can take a little of my advice, because I think this has worked for the UA. Have the senate floor decked with CellularOne signs. Have the senators get sponsored by Nike. Perhaps the senate itself can be renamed for big donators. James E. Rogers has got money to burn, I've heard.