Devastating cuts to public higher education have been carried out over the last several years, and now corporate politicians say the only way to deal with the ongoing fiscal crisis of cities and states is more cuts. Thirteen states have already cut higher education spending by 10%! How do we tighten our belts when all that’s left is skin and bones?

Tuition increases, in some cases very dramatic hikes, have demanded that students pay more for less. They are destroying what remains of the only opportunity for many working-class youth, in particular black and Latino students, to get a higher-level education.

There has been some resistance from students, including walkouts, protests, building occupations, and even a nationally coordinated day of action on March 4 last year. At the same time, many students have been prepared to bite the bullet, feeling their only option is to somehow just get through school.

It is well-known that a higher degree is an important way to get ahead, since the jobs with decent pay and benefits available to past generations with just a high school diploma are long gone. But now, the brutal reality is that most of the jobs in today’s economy are low-wage, and what remains of decent jobs in the public sector is being decimated. The official unemployment rate of 16- to 24-year-olds is 18%.

So why are young people still being encouraged to go to colleges that now offer worse education at a higher cost? This is now mainly hype to pretend the American Dream is still attainable. But universities have become less and less institutions of higher learning and more and more centers for generating revenue and profits for big business. The university workforce has been transformed, with a majority of classes now taught by non-tenured faculty, many of whom are inexperienced doctoral students slaving away for poverty wages.

For-profit textbook companies and test prep agencies have proliferated. Meanwhile, the student population is saddled with skyrocketing debt, a situation that only benefits the loan companies and businesses that are looking for a highly exploitable workforce desperate for employment. There is increasingly only room for a small technical elite, who are mostly trained in the private universities.

For all the rest, youth unemployment and underemployment are here to stay. The cuts make getting any decent education harder and, for some, impossible. But there is a deeper crisis for the future of our youth, where the degrees they do receive might not be worth the paper they’re printed on.

Shocked by the events of Egypt, the ruling elite are voicing more concern about the bleak future for youth and the potential backlash. A Business Week article from Feb 2 warned: “An economy that can’t generate enough jobs to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed – including growing numbers of recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to offer.”

The entire priorities of our society are backward. Education should not be simply about getting a job, with students competing to make themselves more attractive to the needs of big corporations. Stable employment should be available to everyone, not just the sons and daughters of the rich.

Education should reflect society’s responsibility to develop everyone’s mental, physical and creative capacity, thus tapping into the full human potential that is tragically squandered by the logic of capitalism. This means providing a free, high-quality education for all from pre-K through college. The problem is that this option is disappearing under present-day capitalism. Increasingly, this can only be done by transforming society and through creating a socialist society where the economy is democratically planned to provide full employment and living-wage jobs.

Egypt and North Africa should be a warning to the ruling classes all around the world. At some stage, the anger and frustration in the U.S. will find an expression that may take an explosive form.

Our starting point is to defend what we have. That means organizing to stop the budget cuts and saying that the rich should pay for their own crisis. A “month of action” to defend public education has been called for March. That is the first step in building a movement which demands that we fund education, jobs, and healthcare, not war, Wall Street, or brutal dictators.

If the defenders of capitalism in public office say that they can’t afford this desperately needed shift in priorities, then we have to say that we can’t afford them or their backwards system any longer. Our future is at stake, and it’s time to stand up and fight for it!