Months have passed and the words "economic stimulus" have been thrown around less and less as all ears were subsequently tuned to "clunkers," "health care" and "Balloon Boy."

But these days, the effects of the stimulus are about as noticeable as the talk surrounding it -- pretty much nonexistent.

Specifically, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan seemed fairly excited for the "more than $100 billion in education funding and college grants and tuition tax credits, as well as billions more for school modernization," as stated in a Feb. 18 Department of Education press release.

And why not be excited? That's a decent chunk of the $800 billion up for grabs when President Barack Obama approved the Economic Stimulus Plan back in February of this year.

But like dogs, wagging their tails and waiting for their owners to come home, students in public universities have really only been able to sit and wait for any real signs of funding for their education.

Yes, public universities have received some of the stimulus money, but so have private and for-profit institutions.

For instance, the Department of Education is allocating nearly $44 million to 15 schools and universities in San Francisco County, according to the Stimulus Recovery Tracker compiled by ProPublica, a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Almost all of this stimulus money is in the form of Pell grants, with the rest in the form of Federal Work-Study grants.

SF State is promised $10 million of that amount, according to ProPublica. So with 30,000 students, that works out to about $333 per student. But compare that to a for-profit school like the San Francisco branch of Everest College, part of the Corinthian Colleges, Inc. chain, in the United States and Canada: With a mere 745 students and $4 million of stimulus money, that's a whopping $5,400 per student.

There's a serious issue of misallocation on the part of federal government and on the parts of many recipients. For-profit schools need to be handling their funds better, not spending it on things like commercials. Such schools also already charge more for tuition, thereby earning more per student: Again, yearly tuition at Everest averages $13,000, while SF State students are paying almost $5,000.

Private, for-profit schools don't need stimulus money. Public universities need it. We can't get into classes. We can't pay our professors, janitors or other staff.

When California State University tuition has already more than doubled in the last decade, raising our fees doesn't make sense when money is going to schools that don't deserve it.

That money that could be preventing students from taking more than six years to graduate -- quite the norm these days, according to graduation figures on the CSU Web site.

It's not just a matter of there not being enough funds to go around. What money is out there is in the wrong pockets and being spent on the wrong things.