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Capital funds should be used to help nontraditional students

Editor,

I strongly believe that government's role in economic hard times like these is to help the common man get by and to help our nation's workers prepare for what could be a very different future economy.

Given the recently declared recession, I particularly appreciate UNM going ahead with major capital improvement projects. Spending money on construction will create jobs that are desperately needed right now. But job creation is only half of the equation for state-run and state-funded institutions of higher education.

As Reed Dasenbrock, New Mexico's secretary of higher education, appropriately pointed out in the Sunday Albuquerque Journal, increasing the education of the American work force is the cornerstone of retooling for our state's future economy. In his op-ed, Dasenbrock points out that nationwide, "3 million more jobs will require bachelor's degrees, and we don't have enough graduates to fill them."

I am disappointed that improvements approved by the UNM Board of Regents didn't include expanding the Children's Campus or remodeling important institutions that support UNM's mission of higher learning for everyone. Dasenbrock doesn't specifically point this out in his op-ed, but there will be many older students returning to school to sit out the recession. He does get into keeping New Mexico's colleges affordable, and, in my mind, part of that affordability is an on-campus facility to take care of the needs of returning students with families. After all, how will the average New Mexican mother or father manage to pay for both going back to school and child care without an affordable, safe place to take good care of their children?

Improving UNM's atrocious minority graduation rate should also be high on the list of so-called improvements for the state's flagship institution of higher learning in our minority-majority state. The key to higher minority graduation rates is that we minorities see people who look like us throughout academia. Unfortunately, UNM falls woefully short on this objective with only 10 percent of tenure-track professors being black, American Indian or Hispanic. Fortunately, UNM has some great institutions to help offset the lack of minority professors. But our ethnic centers are underfunded and housed in Mesa Vista Hall, which used to be dorms that now look like they haven't been remodeled since the mid-1970s.

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I think some of that capital improvement money should go to remodel Mesa Vista Hall and expand the Children's Campus to show UNM's students with families and minority communities that they are as important as another Pit facelift.

Danny Hernandez

Daily Lobo reader

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