Last week, the UC Office of the President proposed a plan to the UC Regents that would raise tuition at least 8 percent, with the possibility of increases of as much as 16 percent—the difference would depend on state funding—every year through 2016. Tuition and fees, currently $12,192 for an undergraduate California resident, could climb as high as $22,068 before the University of California’s newest crop of freshmen receives their diplomas.
Executive Vice President Nathan Bostrom and Vice-President Patrick Lenz, who proposed the plan, said the measured approach would allow students the opportunity to plan for the worst, and avoid unpredictable shocks like the 32 percent fee hike that went into effect last year, and which was followed by another 8 percent hike approved for this year. (Additionally, Bostrom and Lenz would also raise that last figure to 9.6 percent.)
Claudia Magaña, UCSC senior and president of the systemwide University of California Student Association, says it’s time to stop the fee increases.
“As long as fees are on the table,” she says, “they’re never seriously going to look at other solutions.”
The UC Regents were overwhelmingly against the plan too. Opposing it were Student Regent Alfredo Mireles Jr., Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and Board Chair Sherry Lansing, who said at the meeting, “This scenario is not what we want. There’s not a person around the table that wants to raise tuition.”
If all this fee talk is Greek to you, here is a primer.
What are UC fees?
Tuition and fees at the University of California are broken down into five categories: Educational, Student Services, Nonresident, Professional, and Campus. Every student at every UC pays the first two: the Educational Fee (also known as tuition), which goes to the university’s budget, and the Student Services Fee (formerly the Registration Fee), which goes toward support services like health services and career services. Nonresident tuition is a kind of tax out-of-state students pay. Professional schools, like Berkeley’s Boalt School of Law or the UC Davis School of Medicine, assess an additional fee to support instruction specific to their programs. Campus fees are a catchall that cover everything from bus passes to sports facilities, and vary from campus to campus (it’s $1,225 this year at UCSC).
Fees: A History
Once upon a time, the state of California was committed to providing higher education tuition-free for its residents, in the same way it does for elementary and secondary education. When the first incidental fees (what are now the Student Services Fee) were charged in the 1920s, they were for costs not related to instruction—things like dorms and sports facilities.
Tuition (a.k.a. the Educational Fee) was first instituted in the ’70–’71 academic year, and it was originally meant to fund capital improvements. But that gradually changed, and by the late 1970s Educational Fee income was used exclusively for student financial aid programs.
From the ’70s through 1990, tuition remained relatively static. Then crisis hit California, and for the first time, the state significantly reduced funding for UC. In the first half of the ’90s, tuition increased by 157 percent (from $951 in ’90-’91 to $3,086 in ’94-’95) in response to state funding reductions. Then again, between 2002 and 2006, the Educational Fee effectively doubled ($2,716 to $5,406), and additional fees for nonresident and professional students went up as well. The 32 percent increase applied mid-year in 09-’10, plus the 8 percent increase approved to take effect this year, brings us to where we are today, with the prospect of another doubling on the horizon in the next four years.
No Free Ed
The UC Office of the President knows as well as anyone that fee increases, even of the magnitude witnessed over the last 20 years, are not nearly enough to balance the university’s budget.
The UCOP puts it plainly in the 2011-2012 budget. “Over the past 20 years, the State’s inflation-adjusted contribution per UC student has declined by more than 50%; fee levels have been increased to help backfill reductions in State funding,” it reads, adding, in what could be the biggest understatement of the year, “but have not made up the entire loss.”
This past spring the California legislature slashed funding to UC by $500 million; subtract an additional $362.5 million that the university says it has in “mandatory unfunded costs” new this year, and the shortfall amounts to $862.5 million, of which the 8 percent fee increase approved for this fall makes a measly dent of $115.8 million.
The uncomfortable question, asked last weekend by Regents who balked at further fees increases, is who has the resources fill the void left when the eighth largest economy in the world walks away from its commitment? Among the suggestions thrown around was the idea of corporate sponsorship—your college education made possible by Pepsi.
