Another 4-Year University Unneeded

It is always uncomfortable to challenge motherhood issues. Shallow county pride, yearning bureaucrats, junior-level instructors, and, of course, varieties of merchandisers and real estate interests, all joined with a claque of politicians, to promote still another four-year college for Ventura County. This is at a time when our K-12 educational system is clearly inadequate to its challenges and unable to qualify our youth for proper participation in by no means demanding post-secondary education.

In a contrarian posture, as a citizen of the nation and state, rather than as an ambitious local, I urge that the sounder goal should be to beef up our quite adequate junior college system. Instead of requiring our California State University and University of California systems to bear special burdens that serve only to waste their usefulness in assuming a larger role of remedial tutoring, our junior college system should be more focused on one of its historic responsibilities. This is to provide remedial and preparatory instruction for marginally trained aspirants to bachelor programs at four-year campuses.

Aided by some beefing-up of the programming of Ventura, Oxnard and Moorpark colleges, we can avoid any need to build still another four-year campus in this state. Better to tone down our collective ego as a county, improve our current educational operations and avoid quite unneeded expansions. More public spending does indeed stimulate the money machine, from which we all benefit, but surely there are better stimuli than casually dumping more money into mediocre education.

EDWARD SHUCK

Thousand Oaks