Educated State Legislature Still Cuts the Budget

There is an interesting new study from the Chronicle of Higher Education that tells us how well educated our Virginia legislators are, but it fails to explain why they've cut the education budget by 12 percent in the past two years and by a lot more than that in the past decade.

Virginia's legislative body of 140 people in two houses has an 89 percent college graduation rate (the general population in the Old Dominion has a college graduation rate of 34 percent with 40 percent having no college at all). Fifty-eight percent of those legislators have education beyond college, though not necessarily another degree.

Thirty-eight of our legislators graduated from either Virginia Tech or Virginia and 79 percent went to college in Virginia (some of those same legislators also went to school outside the state).

Those are impressive achievements (No. 2 in the nation behind California). But the "I've got mine so screw you" mentality seems to prevail.