Of all the cheap stumbles by the Idaho Legislature, one of
the most pathetic is the
cuts made in a college scholarship plan that was already a pitiful
attempt to
persuade bright Idaho kids to seek their higher education in their
home state.
Legislative budget writers have amputated 20 percent from the
Promise Scholarship
program created a year ago as an incentive to students with top
grades to go to
college in Idaho.
At a piddling $250 per semester, it was never much of an incentive.
College in
Idaho costs an arm and a leg, thanks to the Legislature's chronic
malnourishment of
education. An Idaho high school graduate with great grades can
find colleges all over
the country happy to provide many times that $250 pseudo-scholarship
for a
chance to harvest some of the best young brains from this state.
Now the budget writers have decided Idaho can't even do that
well. They are
cutting the Promise Scholarship to $200 a semester. And of course,
the habitual
starvation of Idaho education has once again pressured the institutions
of higher
learning toward even higher tuition. Increases of approximately
12 percent are
expected. So Idaho is raising the prices and cutting the scholarships.
The promise
of education in Idaho has been strangled, and there are legislative
fingerprints all
over its windpipe.
The new, lower $200 "Promise" scholarships are even
more of a travesty than the
pittance provided for that purpose last year. Just like the education
programs of
the Legislature and of Gov. Dirk Kempthorne, these scholarships
are all promise
and no action. Education is undervalued in Idaho; why shouldn't
the same be true of
this half-assed scholarship?
In fact, why even bother with the charade of bidding for the
retention of Idaho's
top scholars with an uncompetitive amount like $200? Save that
kind of education
spending for something Idaho's leaders really believe in, like
new kerosene lanterns
for one-room schoolhouses or horse-drawn school buses.
Besides, it is probably too late to keep brains in Idaho. Watching
Idaho legislators
and the voters who elected them, you get the impression that the
last brains in this
state trickled over the border into more appreciative places years
ago. There may
be nobody left but us dummies in this living legislative tribute
to the 19th century.
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