“They seem to be saying that the students will have to pay for amistake made by the bigwigs who didn’t know how to keep abudget,”
Similarly to the previous reading on the NYC Fiscal Crisis, the citizens are always the victim to budget cuts, raise in taxes, even if they were not a part of the problem. In this instance, the primarily non-white student populations are the ones to face the consequence of CUNY not keeping a budget.
The arrival oftuition at CUNY seemed to be in keeping with national trends towardmuchmoreexpensivecollegebillsthatwouldsoonsethighereducationapart as the province of the elite.®
It sad that higher education is stated as “the province of the elite” in this section due to the need to charge tuition. Education should be a right to all who seek it, you shouldn’t have to pay for it because in return give people easier access to the workforce, and help the economy.
Two more schools—Medgar Evers, located in Brooklyn’s CrownHeights, and York College, in Jamaica, Queens, both with overwhelm¬ingly black student enrollments—were to be converted from four-year totwo-year schools.
I believe that this is a blatant example of racial discrimination and how the higher education system makes it very difficult for minority students to finish school or just have higher education opportunities. It’s almost like they wanted to set them up to fail.
Manyworry that today’s arrivals are undermining American values and chang-ing America’s racial makeup—that they will make America, to use PeterBrimelow’s phrase, an alien nation
I feel like this worrying is very contradictory, in the beginning of this introduction that writer talks about how immigration changed New Yorkers lives in a positive way. Now, they are saying that they liked the change but they don’t want too much change because then, it undermines American values.
These negative atti-tudes have long been forgotten in a haze of history, replaced by images thatglorify the past.
Even in present day native-born Americans view immigrants as “creatures” that do not belong in this country. However they are ignorant to the fact that immigration helps drive the expansion of the labor force and contributes to economic growth. I presume that the reason for present-day New Yorkers now not seeing immigrants in that negative light is because immigrants now, as stated earlier in the introduction, are predominately Asians, Latin Americans, West Indians, etc. People of color. Since America has an anti-people of color history, it would be fair to assume that once the immigrants of color started to show up, they cared less about the Jewish and Italian immigrants.