Candidates ignoring college funding issues

College funding isn’t a hot button issue in the current presidential election, but it should be. So says the National Education Association, whose president, Dennis Van Roekel is urging candidates to take note that the rising cost of college tuition is a “potent ingredient in the economic anxiety brewing within the electorate, especially politically undecided parents.”

NEA’s latest survey finds 70 percent of college student parents say making college more affordable was an important issue to them in the upcoming election; 34 percent said it was the most important issue to them.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, college enrollment has gone up 17 percent since 2000. Still, the issue of rising tuition costs, as Van Roekel points out, has been a “sleeper pocketbook issue of the 2008 campaign.”