Because we are college students, what happens to the Department of Education happens to us and negative impacts are a big deal to your continuing college career, or family member’s future college aspirations.

Since Paul Ryan was named Mitt Romney’s running mate his budget plans have been called into question. The big two focus points have been his proposed changes and cuts to Medicare and the food stamp program, but another red flag is Ryan’s proposed cuts to education. The cuts would be to overall funding for education, the Head Start program and Pell Grants.

Ryan has also proposed to cut financial aid for college students and cut $115 million from the Department of Education. Let that one sink in.
According to Steven Cook, the president of the Michigan Education Association, over 2 million children would be affected by the elimination of Head Start and 9 million college students will have their Pell Grants cut.

During a trip through Iowa, President Obama said that because of current budget cuts, “this year, several thousand fewer educators will be going back to school.”
On the flip side of all these proposals, Ryan’s budget gives greater tax cuts to the wealthy and Romney supports his running mate.
Since the announcement, Romney and Ryan want to keep the line firmly in place separating the wealthy and everyone else with their proposed tax cuts and budget adjustments.
Obama has latched on to these possible education cuts and has already released an ad attacking Romney on the education front. In the ad, it says that “Romney says class sizes don’t matter, and he supports Paul Ryan’s budget which could cut education by 20 percent.”

What happens with education in the next 10 years concerns current college students and those high school students with hopes to attend some type of university within that time. Employers are looking for people with college degrees, no matter what it is in. Plus, the United States is lacking in math and science, which we use to do quite well in considering the fact we landed on the moon first.

In a report by the National Math and Science Initiative, U.S. students ranked 25th in math and 17th in science out of 31 countries. The NMSI goes on to state that the U.S. sits at 17th, worldwide, when it comes to the number of science degrees earned and awarded. And another little fun fact from their findings is that “barely “ 18 percent of high school seniors are performing “at or above the proficient level in science.”

On the same trip through Iowa, Obama added this to his comments on the current budget cuts, “at a time when the rest of the world is racing to out-educate America, these cuts force our kids into crowded classrooms, cancel programs for preschoolers and kindergarteners and shorten the school week and the school year.”
Seeing as how students haven’t been performing too well, what would happen if these proposed cuts are put in place? Those numbers would take another dive to be honest.
With cuts to education possible if Romney is elected, the defense spending will increase. Even though Romney doesn’t have very much experience in foreign policy he has supported talk of making the defense budget 4 percent of the country’s gross domestic product and increasing the spending by $100 billion in the coming year, as reported by TIME magazine.

In order to reverse the defense cuts that were put in place by President Obama, Romney and Ryan will make cuts of their own but to domestic programs — such as Medicare and the food stamp program, oh and education.

We don’t need another George Bush approach to defense spending. We had two terms of that and it didn’t really get us anywhere except knee deep in national debt. It was Obama who helped do what Bush never did, actually find Osama Bin Laden and make the call to have him killed. And Obama is still using that as this presidential campaign continues, as well he should be.

Bush’s presidency left a nasty impression on people and some are still recovering.