Commentary

My So-Called Stimulus Job: Higher Education Edition

Via College Life blog at the Orange County Register, UCI folks question the Governor’s claim about the number of jobs the stimlus created for California colleges:

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says Congress’ federal stimulus program has saved or created 8,356 jobs in the University of California system, a claim that comes as a surprise at UC Irvine, Orange County’s largest employer.

Schwarzenegger’s claim was made by his California Recovery Task Force,which also says the stimulus created or saved 26,156 jobs in the California State University system, bringing the total for the two systems to about 34,500.

“We can’t figure out where the governor’s office got the data to support saying 34,000 jobs have been saved in the CSU and UC systems. No such data has been forwarded by our campus to the state,” said Cathy Lawhon, director of media relations at UCI.

And in other education stimuls news, Politics K-12 reports that VP Joe Biden says 325,000 education jobs have been created or saved. Let’s go with saved, because in the education sector there was much more state budget fill than new job creation. As Governor Schwarzenegger explained:

“Those teachers would have been gone if it hadn’t been for the stimulus money.”

Joe Biden real man of genius here.