<p>To be quite frank, I’m nervous about some schools (specifically in Florida) losing not only the educational staff/opportunities to give the school a good name, but also the students staying instate/going to public universities (this is with my experience with Florida schools). I will explain why. Here in Florida, we have a scholarship that gives very good students a 75% scholarship (or so) to any public Florida school and then most of Floridians get more scholarships/prepaid to pay for the other 25% (essentially, getting paid to go to college). Bright Futures (the 75% scholarship) has been getting continuously cut for a little while and we’ve were warned when I was in my sophomore/junior years that it might be gone when we graduated. This budget cut might be the final straw. Hence, UF, which depended on this scholarship to bring in the top caliber students, will be hurt significantly by not being able to offer free education anymore.</p>
<p>Don’t get me wrong. UF is a fantastic university! However, there are many people I know that “settled” for UF because it was free. With education cuts, UF’s ability to offer research opportunities and high quality education MAY diminish, too. It’s just annoying because UF did work really hard to build up a good reputation this past decade and the economy might blow all their work to nothing…</p>