Vice reports that states accepting the Alito Court’s invitation to make women second-class citizens may drive college students to safer, freer states:
Allie Schachtel, an independent college admissions counselor based in Florida, said she’s seen a growing number of clients start to make the geography of abortion rights a primary criteria. “I’ve had parents and students say we aren’t looking at any schools in Texas or any schools in Tennessee and Ohio,” she said.
…Returning college students are also worried about the end of abortion, and women of color specifically told VICE News the Supreme Court’s decision made them feel even more uneasy about attending colleges where abortion is banned [Neda Toloui-Semnani, Anya Zoledziowski, and Ani Ucar, “‘It’s Scary’: Students Fear Going to College in Red States After Roe,” Vice, 2022.07.01].
Madiera Lister of Spearfish left South Dakota a few years ago to study physical therapy at Kansas State University. The overturning of Roe v. Wade has her considering med school so she can serve women as an OB-GYN. She says that South Dakota’s decision to deny her freedom and autonomy means she will never come back to this state:
There are a lot of flaws with the state of South Dakota that I have been able to look past as I continue to come home and spend the summers with the people that I love, but after the people running this state showed me how little they care about me at a fundamental level, I will not live here or raise a family here. Ever.
I will also not live in any other state that doesn’t grant me my reproductive rights, especially when I decide to start my family, because lack of access to abortion is medically dangerous for me [Madiera Lister, “Abortion Ruling and South Dakota’s Uncaring Leaders Convince Young Woman to Consider New Career—and State,” South Dakota Standard, 2022.07.02].
38% of students at South Dakota’s public universities are non-residents. According to IPEDS, a quarter of first-time degree-seeking undergraduates at both South Dakota State University and Augustana University came from Minnesota, a state that still treats women as equal, autonomous citizens and will permit them to terminate pregnancies caused by rape.
Two of my kids left the state right after high school, the third can’t wait to leave, I don’t blame them and never have tried to change their minds. South Dakota has absolutely nothing to offer today’s youth and it keeps getting worse.
Three down, one to go. We’re likely out of here after the passing of the surviving parent. Three kids are gone and not moving back. Only one hung around for in-state tuition (six degrees between them). My sibs left 40+ years ago and won’t move back.
The Silent and Boomer Generations wrecked South Dakota.
Then downsize. Six regental universities in South Dakota is ridiculous, for sure. Boycotts are probably the best ways to reverse red state failure in my home state anyway.
NOem’s daughter left, wonder if that was the reason? Asking for a friend.
Larry K-this “red” state won’t cut back the # of colleges/universities because the power party (GOP) is far too concerned with maintaining the socialism who currently serving those communities dependent on these ed centers for their economies. This state thrives on socialism; the military, farm and ag interests, highway and infrastructure lead the way-then come to play the Federal “grants” coerced by the very same Republican “Three Musketeers” who complain about “tax & spend” Democrats and turn around their rhetoric when in power and put two wars on the credit card and huge tax cuts for the richest and corporations driving the deficit upward in trillions and then blame Democrats again!
Yup. The censorship, book burning and restrictions on what students can learn add to the brain drain, as well. Dumbing down the curriculum is not a way to attract the best students. I was just reading about how in 1229 the University of Paris banned teaching Aristotle and various contemporary commentators on Aristotle. The University of Toulouse recruited disaffected students by saying they would continue to teach the books of Aristotle.
If there are fewer kids, we need fewer universities. Cut the bloat now, force their hand.
How are 66 county seats and their bureaucracies either conservative or sustainable? They’re not; but, it is the way Republican cronyism and patronage built barricades to democracy by providing benefits of the public dole to those who say they deplore big gubmint in a state that hates poor people.
South Dakota Democrats need to run on a corporate income tax, ending video lootery, reducing the number of South Dakota counties to 25 and turning Dakota State and/or Northern State University into community colleges.
Grudz–that you are opposed to higher education, somehow, comes as no surprise to me. Yet, you espouse the Socratic method with your advocacy of gravy soaked extended discussions with your collection of old fools. You are marching backward into the darkness of ignorance.
My good friend Lar’s idea to turn Northern into a Culinary School and Dakota State into a barber college are really swell ideas. Not everyone can be lawyers or engineers, Mr. Blundt, and the world is in dire need of cooks and barbers and other sorts of workers. It seems like Northern and Dakota state, which might even end up in the same gerrymandered county of “Clown Lakesbury”, are logical choices to be chopped down.
OK grudz, you can turn them back into colleges. They could also go to nine man football, and women’s sports why bother. Republicans don’t follow the law anyway. Your idea of culinary degrees and barber degrees just show socialism run amuck, are you a libbie grudz? I’ve never looked for a culinary degree at anyplace I’ve eaten. My wife cuts my hair. Otherwise, I’d go the Clooney route. You know real bacon just takes a delicate touch. What do you eat for breakfast? A smoothie? You know they have an International Pancake day in Liberal, Kansas. Which brings me to why are their no Coservative towns in America but several towns named Liberal? Its a conundrum.
Republicans in favor of redundant smaller government?
South Duhkota needs politicians with hearts and souls and a heaping portion of intelligbence.You need several hundred thousand less magats.
Got yer goat a bit today, Mr. Anderson. Fitting, as tomorrow is Freedom Day! I wish you a good one, celebrating our country. Raise your glass to ol’ grudznick at least once, if you would please.
Gruds, Nadal is goat. The sounds outside are what Kristi wants for the Presidents mountain. After watching her the past week I realize she doesn’t answer questions any better than you do.
I remember when Janklow wanted to cut the number of counties and was met by opposition on both sides.
Mr. LCJ, it is unfortunate at that time Mr. Janklow had not enlisted grudznick and his close personal friend, Lar, to assist him. This is now a different era.
Rewild the west, and cut South Dakota counties down to 25 and the school districts with them!
I have never understood where the idea of cutting NSU down to a community college comes from. It, in fact, was started under that concept but then answered the call to supply teachers to the state and at one point supplied 80 percent of the classrooms in the state with teachers. In so doing, it needed to provide teachers with qualifications in the major disciplines and offered a curriculum to meet that need. It now enrolls about 3,500 students in its undergraduate programs. It offers 45 bachelor’s degrees, 53 minors, six associate degrees, 16 pre-professional programs, 23 certificates and 10 graduate degrees. I would like an explanation of how eliminating those programs would benefit the state other than to salve the feelings of its uneducated and resentful populous. And it is true that those programs enable graduates to find livelihood in other states and leave South Dakota to the regressives.
A common crime on university campuses in South Dakota is dropping a pill in an undergrad’s beer at a kegger or in the bar and raping her in a car and even in her own dorm room.
As long as Noem is happy to go to the extreme of forcing 10-year-old children to carry out a birth, she should have no trouble making drug induced rape a mandatory life in prison penalty without parole.
Shackling a child to endure child birth is extreme, and cruelly foolish if the state doesn’t go to the greatest lengths to eliminate the likelihood of rape. Frankly, the state, by forcing a 10-year-old to become a birther, becomes a party to the unspeakable crime of rape by inflicting a cruelty and pain that the 10-year-old would be incapable of understanding and which could be even more traumatic and life-threatening than the original rape. But I’m getting off the track here.
Noem and the fools in the legislature who are celebrating the overturn of Roe v. Wade are spiking the ball. They don’t care that voters in South Dakota twice strongly rejected ballot issues to overturn Roe. They honestly don’t care what voters think as long as they can hold onto power. Kristi Noem and her Rapists’ Rights Agenda need to be pushed back hard. We know that the majority of voters don’t agree with Noem’s Rapists’ Rights Agenda.
The few Democrats in the legislature need to make sure Noem and her ugly horde pay a big price for their extremism. They need to review the rape laws of South Dakota and propose penalties for rape of any kind (including in marital relationships) so extreme that unwanted pregnancies become few.
They should also mandate science-based sex education in all schools (starting in elementary levels) and public broadcasting and make contraceptives free to all (even under age 16 without family consent). They should also require that South Dakota universities inform all prospective students and faculty the state will enforce a total abortion ban with criminal penalties, but also aggressively enforce mandatory science-based sex ed, free contraceptives to all and mandatory life sentences for rape.
I think Anne is wise. In an era when education mattered, her factual information would carry the argument. That’s not Noem’s era. The numbers of counties and school districts should be cut down, but the state needs colleges much more than it needs planes, TV studios, and security details. I’d say it could do without GOED, too, since they don’t seem to have solved the problem of brain drain. But, my support for higher education is predicated on it actually being education, and not indoctrination. Right now, at least in South Dakota, Republicans seem most interested in what they want to ban from the classroom, burn from the curriculum and bowdlerize into mush.
SD universities currently compete for students with taller and taller rock walls in their student wellness centers, but competing on issues that matter seems against the grain of how things are done.
Well…I’ve been impressed with the improvement of our campuses around the state. I thought Jim Abbott did a great job of revitalizing USD and the “revisioning” of the Black Hills State campus is quite impressive. State needs no overt boosterism, it has by far the most active and vocal alums from throughout the state. Our challenge is that our universities may become empty vessels…all show and no academic go. Faculty salaries are deplorable. The moronic campaign by the right wing to dumb down the colleges to reflect the biases of far right illiterates is a threat to the investment this state has made in higher education. Time to swing the pendulum the other way.
It looks like enrollments are down in the whole system in large part because the Trump Organization made it harder for foreign students to live in South Dakota.
https://www.aberdeennews.com/story/news/education/2021/09/25/nsu-enrollment-statistics-2021/5801948001/
Ms. Anne, Lar will provide our response to your question.