SF State President says Gov. Brown hasn't stood up for higher education
by Brian Leubitz
Yesterday we saw the scary fact that tuition would exceed state support in the UC system. Today, the long-standing president of San Francisco State, Robert Corrigan, made his feelings known about the current budget situation and the governor's leadership in an exit interview with the Bay Citizen.
The president of San Francisco State University said Monday that Gov. Jerry Brown "doesn't seem to appreciate high-quality education in California." ...
President Corrigan is leaving after 24 years as president of the San Francisco campus amongst mixed opinions. Many seem to think that he could have done more to protect students, while others seem resigned to the situation in Sacramento. Ultimately, the question really can't be answered at any of the individual campuses of either CSU or UC. It is a failing of our state, our leaders, and our voters. Together we have conspired to deprive our institutions of higher education of the necessary funding and then essentially required them to make the education cost prohibitive to much of the state's population.
It is easy to question Gov. Brown, especially in hindsight. But, with structural problems blooming like a stinking rose in Sacramento, the Governor is hardly the only person worthy of blame. It is a sad fact that we once were wholeheartedly committed to education, today we cannot say that.
Tuition will exceed general fund support for the first time for UC system this year
by Brian Leubitz
There was once a vision for education in California that allowed us to dream big. It allowed the state to have expectations for the future, because we were investing in it through education. We went so far as to build a master plan that included tuition free higher education. Those days now seem like an extremely distant dream.
For the first time, the total amount that University of California students pay in tuition this year will surpass the funding the prestigious public university receives from the state. It is a historic shift for the UC system and part of a national trend that is changing the nature of public higher education.
Propelled by budget crises in California and elsewhere, the burden of paying for education at a public college or university, once heavily subsidized by taxpayers, is shifting to students and their families. (LA Times)
While the Right is crowing about class warfare, they are doing their damnedest to ensure that those below them can't work their way up. Higher education, for several generations, has been the most significant way of upward mobility. Decreasing access further cements that the rich stay rich. A sad day for the California dream, indeed.
University of California regents today voted to raise tuition by about $1,070, sending the total cost to $12,192 for the upcoming school year.
After a recently approved $650 million cut in state funding, UC regents said they had no choice but to raise tuition to close about a quarter of the system's $1 billion budget deficit. When combined with a previous hike, tuition will be 18 percent more -- about $1,890 -- in fall 2011 than it was in fall 2010. Each campus also charges undergraduates about $1,000 in additional fees. (SacBee)
The university systems are both on the hook for another $100 million in the triggered cuts if we don't reach the higher, hopeful, revenue figure. By the way, the Controller announced today that we aren't actually $230 million behind where we need to be, but $85 million, because somebody forgot to tally a big check from the unclaimed property account.
That being said, the discussion about the additional cuts was bumped until a later date, but don't be shocked if more increases aren't on the horizon.
One vote against the increase: LG Newsom.
"The biggest threat to our democracy is income inequality, the loss of the middle class," Newsom said. "And here we are once again, putting the nail in the coffin of the middle class. That's exactly who gets hurt in this debate."
Over the last few budget cycles, the inevitable became reality. We started spending more money on prisons than on higher education. Tuition (oh, sorry, that's not tuition, those are "fees") skyrocketed as we stopped subsidizing education for the next generation of California's leaders. Sure, we aren't the only state doing so, but the magnitude of our cost increases should make any one shudder.
For example, as I entered UC Berkeley to get my policy degree, the school had just tacked on a $5,000 "professional fee." That's just another 5 grand that will be tacked on to the loans of students that really aren't gearing up to make millions. Sure, the federal government, over the last few years, has radically changed the student loan system in a number of beneficial ways. (Including some forgiveness for public employees) However, the sheer amount of debt for students is becoming unmanageable.
And of course, we shouldn't be surprised to hear that we reap what we sow:
For many college students and their families, rising tuition costs and a tough economy are presenting new challenges as college bills come in. This has led to a little-known but growing population of financially stressed students, who are facing hunger and sometimes even homelessness. (NPR)
The story (listen up top) goes on to chronicle the plight of some of these students. They end up skipping meals, couch surfing through the semester, working two jobs, or being forced to drop out. These are the choices that we are offering to our students.
Schools like UCLA will work with students to help out, but the fact that many students simply won't talk about these issues along with the growing numbers mean that not every student will get the help that they need.
Lest anybody think that we haven't raised any taxes, just check out the fee bills of our students. Sure, call them fees with a thousand different names, but taxes are what they really are. Instead of using a more fair and progressive taxation structure, we're piling on debt to the backs of our students, and really, our future.
I'm glad that the Chamber is spending so much time trying to protect their $1.5 billion tax cut they got last year. Perhaps they can hire some of the unemployed students in their "extra time" to help out with that campaign. I hear they are looking for some jobs.
In part 1 of a New Deal for California, I discussed why any effort to rebuild the state must begin with a frontal assault on high unemployment as the only reliable means of achieving budget stability - as opposed to self-defeating quests for balance via austerity. In part 2, I studied how the quest for a more perfect democracy is inextricably linked to a renewal of democratic control over the state's own revenues.
Today, I want to discuss two areas of policy that are among the largest spending categories in the California state budget, but which also represent two faces of the state, and two approaches to developing its youth, and two sets of values - namely, education and prisons.
Arnold's recent proposal to put a floor under higher education at 10% of the state budget and a ceiling over prisons at 7% of the state budget is only the most recent example of a long trend of discussing the two in the same breath. As I discussed in the linked article, Schwarzenegger's approach is fundamentally flawed, a mirage of egalitarianism masking a reality of utter callousness. A moral society cannot pay for the future of its most talented youth through the deliberate immiseration of its least advantaged.
However, a New Deal for California will have to grapple with the reality that California will either educate or incarcerate its young, and that the power to choose lies with us.
Students at public universities in California are planning a series of demonstrations across the state protesting tuition hikes today. While a few isolated incidents in recent weeks have provided fodder for some in the media to dismiss their concerns, the students' cause is incredibly important. If we continue to yearly raise tuition in California far beyond inflation, we threaten to derail all that has enabled my home state to prosper in decades past.
It is no accident that the Golden State's Golden Age of economic innovation coincided with the establishment of and continued investment in the best public university system in the world. Fifty years ago, forward-thinking policymakers declared that California would be a state where higher education was the birthright of every qualified resident. Since then, we've become the world's great innovator in computers, biotechnology, space exploration, and clean technology.
Unfortunately, the vision that made California one of the largest and most diverse economies on the planet has fallen to the wayside in recent years, as Governor Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers have decided that it's politically easier to balance state budgets on the backs of students.
The result? Student fees have more than doubled at the University of California and California State University systems over the past decade, and enrollment was reduced by more than 45,000 in the past two years. When you price students out of a college education, you don't just harm the individual. You deny the state the future teachers, nurses, and engineers necessary to propel our economy forward.
For the first time in California's history, our state government spent more money on prisons than higher education.
It's a shocking figure - but not a surprising one when you consider that it now costs more to send a criminal to prison than a student to Harvard. Because we are now spending so much on failed prisons, we can't invest sufficient funds to create affordable colleges and universities.
Tuition at our public universities has skyrocketed as much as 30% nationwide - just as students are forced to endure budget cuts, slashed enrollment, impossible waitlists and reduced course offerings.
My own parents worked as janitors their whole lives so that I could be the first in my family to go to college. I know firsthand that the true spirit of California opportunity and optimism is nurtured in great schools, not failed prisons.
That is why I am fighting to fund California colleges and universities by requiring Big Oil to pay their fair share for the oil they pump out of our state's land and water. California can no longer afford to be the only major oil-producing state that doesn't levy such a fee. Texas, for instance, generates $400 million for higher education through a similar fee.
My bill, AB 656, would raise up to $2 billion a year for the UC, CSU and community colleges with a 12.5 percent tax on oil extracted within California. That's considerably less than the 25-percent tax levied in Sarah Palin's Alaska.
The oil companies will tell you that they already pay enough taxes and that this bill will result in jobs lost. Yet oil companies have been experiencing record breaking profits for the past several years. Exxon Mobile, for instance, raked in a $45.2 billion profit in 2008, the most ever by a publicly-traded U.S. company.
More money for higher education means more classes and more financial aid for more students.
Making sure students receive a quality education is the key to our future and to public safety. A quality education grants people invaluable tools to succeed. With 60% of inmates functionally illiterate, education is the best strategy to rehabilitate criminals and to empower people with the tools to succeed.
The fight to save higher education won't be easy. And AB 656 is a simple and fair solution to funding our universities and colleges in California. Please join me and thousands of other concerned Californians in fighting for higher education at www.facebook.com/FairTuition, and sign the petition here: www.AlbertoTorrico.com/Fair-Share-for-Fair-Tuition.
AB 656, authored by Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico, would have established an oil and gas severance tax (California being the only oil and gas producing state in the union not having one) and earmarked the proceeds for puiblic higher education, giving our universities a financial base upon which to operate and easing the burden on the general fund.
On Thursday, the Assembly Appropriations Committee took action on it that essentially defeats the bill for this legislative cycle. The committee deleted the oil and gas severance tax portion of the bill and replaced it with a simple reporting requirement. The amendments require the state Board of Equalization to annually report to the legislature the amount of revenue that would be generated for public higher education if the oil and gas tax was implemented.
Maybe it can be resurrected as we get closer to trying to deal with this year's budget problems, especially since the Governor has placed a high priority on helping the CSU's and UC's recoup some of their cuts. This could be the way top offset the Governor's political shenanigans of trying to play off higher education unions against the prison unions.
Tomorrow at noon, pickets will spring up on every campus of the University, a familiar sight especially since the U.C regents decided to raise undergraduate tuition by 32% this fall. This time, it’s PRO-UAW (the union for post-doctoral scholars or “post-docs”) and UPTE (the union for research and technical workers) who are protesting the U.C’s stonewalling contract negotiations over wages and benefits.
Lest anyone mistake this picket as just one more expression of discontent at the U.C’s budget woes, let me point out an important fact that shows why this protest shows how both sides of the U.C’s mission as a public research university are being undermined by the Regents’ drive towards privatization: these workers are being paid through Federal grants, not from the U.C’s general budget.
So why would the U.C refuse to pay for cost-of-living increases and benefit improvements when the money isn’t coming out of their funds?
If anybody doubted that the tombstone on the Master Plan has been thoroughly and completely written, here's one more (unnecessary) piece of evidence:
A University of California Board of Regents committee today approved a series of controversial increases in student fees that, if passed by the full board, will raise UC undergraduate education costs by more than $2,500, or 32%, in two steps by fall 2010.
The finance committee vote is expected to be endorsed by the full Board of Regents on Thursday. The two-day meeting is being held at UCLA, where today's session has been marked by raucous protests with at least 14 arrests.
The first step of the fee hike, costing undergraduates an additional $585, will take effect in January. Next fall, students will see another $1,344 increase, bringing the UC education fees to $10,302, along with about $1,000 in campus-based charges. That does not include room, board and books, which can add another $16,000. (LAT 11/18/09)
Add this on top of the fact that CalGrants was substantially cut in the last round of budget negotiations and might be outright eliminated to solve the next budget crisis, and you have a system that is only accessible to all but the wealthiest students.
It is just one more sad day on our well-worn road to mediocrity.
A while back Dave Dayen wrote about the Two Santa Claus Theory and its effect on California governance, and today we get just one more data point to illustrate the general point of what the theory has done to the state. Californians want lots of services, but want somebody else to pay for them.
In today's PPIC poll, we get the data that 70% of Californians are opposed to state budget cuts and increased fees for the state's higher education system. Nonetheless majorities still find that the systems, UC, CSU, and the community colleges, as "good". So, despite the cuts, they are still getting good marks.
The paradox of this whole thing comes in the area of paying to keep the doors open. Thus the cake reference:
In the context of the state budget situation, most Californians place a very high (26%) or high (33%) priority on spending for public higher education, which at $12.2 billion is the third-largest area of spending in the budget. But residents split along partisan lines, with 67 percent of Democrats and 61 percent of independents putting a very high or high priority on spending in this area, compared to 42 percent of Republicans. The same percentage of Republicans (42%) puts a medium priority on higher education spending.
Given the high value that most Californians place on spending for higher education, what would they be willing to do to offset state spending cuts?
* 68 percent are unwilling to increase student fees. Solid majorities across parties, regions, and demographic groups concur.
* 56 percent are unwilling to pay higher taxes. Although 56 percent of Democrats are willing to pay higher taxes for this purpose, 58 percent of independents and 74 percent of Republicans are not.
* 53 percent would support a higher education construction bond measure on the 2010 ballot. But support is lower among likely voters (46% yes, 47% no) for this hypothetical bond measure and would fall short of the simple majority threshold needed to pass such a measure. Here, too, a partisan split emerges, with 61 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of independents saying they would vote yes on a bond and 55 percent of Republicans saying they would vote no.
There are recognitions here that fees are too high and that we need to preserve access. And Californians seem to understand just how important higher education really is to our future economy. However, there is just some sort of disconnect between having good schools and paying for good schools.
This is the wage of the Two Santa Claus Theory, that we could have lots of services and have lots of tax cuts, and everything would be great.
Yet, if the state isn't broken already, as Robert has consistently and persuasively argued, the state is clearly ready to collapse under the expectations of something for nothing. Yes, getting revenue for higher ed spending and other spending priorities will be difficult, and perhaps we'll lose some elections because progressives dare to speak of the essential paradox in California governance since 1978.
However, this is critical to our future. And winning elections is only so important as retaining actual power. If progressive hands are tied and we are able to only preside over the collapse, what's the prize there? Who wants to win just to be the government that saw the state's quality of life decrease. Progressive candidates and campaigns need to clearly articulate a vision for the future where California is a better state nine years from now than it is today. If we can't do that, what's really the point?
It's been a long time, nearly 50 years, since Governor Pat Brown's vision for California brought us what was so frequently dubbed the "California Dream." We had infrastructure that rivaled if not exceeded any in the world. We had a strong social safety net that enabled Californians to pursue careers in the burgeoning middle class. And we had the "Master Plan for Higher Education" that promised highly subsidized education for those Californians that met a basic set of requirments, and shut nobody out.
At the heart of the Master Plan, were the community colleges. The community colleges allowed students who underperformed at high schools to get back on track for a higher degree. They were to be plentiful, high-quality, and cheap. The state was going to kick in 35-40% of the operating revenue, with a bunch of additional funding coming from the county level. You may think that strange given the way the state works today, but back then, pre-Prop 13, counties actually had their own sources of revenue. They could rely on the property taxes and other local taxes to provide opportunities to fund programs like the community colleges.
The community colleges were then to feed in to the newly upgraded UC and CSU systems. At the time, UC was already on of the world's leading research systems. CSU would soon grow to take a very important "middle" place for students. It was originally intended for only bachelor's and master's degrees, with the doctarates being issued at the UC campuses. The various CSU campuses would focus on teacher certification and other public service functions, with the UC doing the bulk of the top-flight research. (Photo Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
And all of this was going to be free for Californians. It was an investment in the future, and it paid off, big-time. The quality graduates that came out of this public education system helped to grow the California economy at a pace far outstripping the rest of the nation. Some like to call the 20th Century the American Century, well, if that was true, the last half of the 20th Century was the California Century.
But like all good centuries, they come to an end. And with the election of Ronald Reagan, and later Deukmejian and Wilson, and to an extent, even Brown's son Jerry, the Master Plan has been gradually chipped away. As we stand right now, of the approximately $18 Billion UC budget, around $3 Billion now comes from the state.
All this is made even more evident today as a Mass Walkout is occuring on all of the UC campuses from San Diego all the way up to Davis, students, faculty, and staff are walking out on classes to picket the university and its administration. And the administration is facing some tough questions of its own, particularly relating to admistrative bloat.
The latest blow to the system is the loss of about $110 million that the community colleges had been expecting from the stimulus bill. Unfortunately, the draw down requirements were not met by our 2009 budget, so those federal dollars go unspent as the community colleges cut classes and limit enrollment, a bitter irony when compared to their original goal of being the "open door" for California students.
But when you look at what used to be the grand scheme for California higher education, you can see the problem is far greater than any administrative bloat or lack of stimu-bux can really address. While trying not to look like an apologist, instead of pointing the finger at Yudof and crew, we should be looking to Arnold and his Republican predecessors and cohorts.
We have destroyed what was once the envy of the world, and are hard at work turning it in to nothing better than a mid-level private education system. At least when you head to the Farm down in Palo Alto, you know you are going to get high fees and tuition. With the UC's students are left in limbo, thinking they were going to get an affordable education. I'll leave you with the words of one of my professors at Berkeley, George Lakoff:
Lakoff, UC Distinguished Professor of Linguistics and author of several popular and scholarly books on the language of politics, said in a letter to UCB's Townsend Center that "the privatization issue goes well beyond public education. It is about whether we have a democracy that works for the common good, or a plutocracy that privileges the wealthy and powerful. Privatizing the world's greatest public university is a giant step away from democracy."(Berkeley Daily Planet 9/17/09
Forty years ago, one man took a small step that inspired a country. The Apollo 11 mission to the moon was a great moment for America as viewers across the nation, in unison, watched one of our own step foot on an otherworldly body for the first time. America's potential was limitless.
I still remember the journey of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. I had just returned from my own life-changing adventure: a two-year stint serving Ethiopia in the Peace Corps. I served in a country that could not afford to feed its population, let alone educate them, and this loss of human potential still slows progress there today. A quality education is important not just for the betterment of individuals but also for society as a whole. In my decades of public service, I have worked tirelessly to ensure that we provide our children with the highest quality education, because I know that our economic growth depends on their intellectual growth.
The success of Apollo 11 would never have happened without the work of America's best and brightest scientists. They were the product of our country's commitment to STEM - science, technology, engineering, and math education. America led the globe in science education, but due to funding cuts and increased international competition, we're falling behind the curve.
It likely won't come to a shock to most CSU students, but they will be seeing higher bills next semester. Not only did Chancellor Charles reed ask the trustees for a 20% fee increase, but he also indicated that he would be looking for ways to save money throughout the system. That means furloughs, more classes taught by less expensive "lecturers," and fewer office hours.
Of course, if you were cynical, you could point out that fee increases seemingly always happen in the summer, when must students are away from their campus. So, it is harder for students to organize. However, that doesn't mean that students will simply lie down. Steve Dixon, president of the California State Student Association plans on making sure the Chancellor and the Legislators hear from students.
"We're very upset," Dixon said. "Every time Sacramento can't balance the books, we students end up bearing the financial responsibility. But we're not getting an increase in quality. We'll see increased class sizes, fewer courses and fewer teachers of Ph.D. quality. Worse, we'll also see tens of thousands of students denied access." (SF Chronicle 7/17/09)
Both state university systems have been making huge cutbacks, and this will hit employees extremely hard. It is unfortunate that despite the fact that Californians want to ensure that we have quality higher education, Far-Right Legislators use the system to once again block wise fiscal and education policay.
The SF Chronicle has a good list of some of the impacts of the budget crisis upon the systems.
Peter Schrag is one of the few columnists left in this state who consistently makes sense, and today he attacks that silly NYTimes article about California, in particular the elements of conventional wisdom:
In his passing references to California's serious issues, many of which have major implications for the nation as a whole, Leibovich collects pieces of the conventional wisdom, even when, as in his facile summary of the causes of gridlock in Sacramento, it's wrong. Since Democrats have again and again agreed to multi-billion dollar cuts, it is not, as he thinks, just a matter of "'no more taxes' (Republicans) and 'no more cuts' (Democrats)."
And while Jerry Brown, in his prior tenure as governor was indeed labeled "Governor Moonbeam" (by a Chicago columnist) for his space proposals, as Leibovich says, the label applied much more broadly to his inattention to the daily duties of his office and, most particularly to his dithering while the forces that produced Proposition 13 began to roll.
Brown later acknowledged that he didn't have the attention span to focus on the property tax reforms that were then so urgently needed to avert the revolt of 1978. But to this day, almost no one has said much of Brown's role in creating the anti-government climate and resentments that helped fuel the Proposition 13 drive.
It was the Brown, echoing much of the 1970s counter-culture, who, as much as anyone, was poor-mouthing the schools and universities as failing their students and who threatened to cut their funding if they didn't shape up. It is Brown who spent most of his political career savaging politics and politicians, even as he ran for yet another office. Now this is the guy who wants to be governor again. But Leibovich doesn't tell his readers that long history. Maybe he doesn't know it.
The line about how those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it can be inserted here. But Schrag hits on the most important failing of the article, and indeed of a good chunk of the political media here in California - they airbrush out the people who suffer for the failures of the politicians.
Where are California and the people who are feeling the pain - the school kids and teachers in hopelessly underfunded schools, the children who are losing their health care, the minimum-wage working mothers struggling to pay their child care, the students who are losing their university grants? Is all this really about nothing?
To far too many, the answer is yes. It's politics as theater, as a sporting event, where winners and losers are checked on a board, and whether or not a leader will keep their position is made the story rather than the principles he or she represents. And yet it's not Governor Hot Tubs and Stogies who will feel the pain of an economic downturn and massive budget cuts, nor well-heeled consultants or columnists who make up the scorecards. It's people.
People like the students in the Cal State system who may see their fees raised 20%, just months after a 10% hike approved in May. This will effectively block higher education for a non-trivial number of students, as will proposed enrollment reductions of 32,000 students.
People like LA County homeowners who have defaulted at twice the rate in May as they have in the previous month, as a foreclosure backlog builds up due to various moratoriums and an increase in repossessed homes entering the market.
People like IOU holders who may have to turn to check-cashing stores to get less-than-full value for their registered warrants after Friday, when most major banks (who have all been bailed out by the federal government, by the way) stop the exchange of the notes.
And people like the elderly, disabled and blind, who rely on the in-home support services that the Governor is trying to illegally cut in contravention of a contempt-of-court citation, at least in Fresno.
These are the great unmentioned in this California crisis, the people who Dan Walters tries to smear in his column today by turning every Democratic concern for the impacts of policy as a sellout to "public employee unions." Behind those unions are workers, and the people they serve need the help the provide, in many cases, simply to survive. But it would be too dangerous to Walters' beautiful mind to consider those faces, so he chooses to make political hay out of the violation of people.
Mr. Schrag's latest screed is a good example of why politics in Sacramento is so dis-functional. Instead of trying to find the truth in the Leibovich article, he mocks both the writer and each of the subjects. In recent years, Schrag has become increasingly bitter. That's very sad because he once was an open-minded person with real insight into the predicaments of modern society. Finally, his memory is not serving him well regarding Propistion 13 and the factors that constituted the ethos of that period. In fact, there was a long and hard fought battle to get property tax relief that got all the way to the state Senate but foundered just short of the necessary two thirds vote. There is much to say about government, schools and taxation in California. But to get anywhere it requires a degree of empathy and engagement with opposing perspectives that no longer seems congenial to Mr. Schrag.
California took a multimillion-dollar step backward Friday in cutting its budget.
Assembly and Senate members in a budget conference committee balked at derailing the Cal Grant program of college aid or stripping Hastings College of the Law of nearly all its state funding.
By rejecting the two proposals by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, however, the committee created a new $235 million headache in its bid to fix a gaping fiscal hole.
The panel is rushing to balance the state's recession-wracked budget by curing a projected $24.3 billion shortfall.
Republicans actually claimed they were against eliminating Cal Grants but wanted to find additional offsets in the budget. But in the end, they voted to get rid of every aid grant for 77,000 low- and middle-income California students who want to attend an institution of higher learning. You would think that the Democrats could do something with that.
With respect to Hastings College, the budget committee averted what could have been a costly disaster.
Schwarzenegger's Hastings proposal would have eliminated about $10.3 million in state funding for the University of California law school, leaving it with only $7,000 in general fund support and $153,000 from lottery revenue.
Sen. Mark Leno, D-San Francisco, argued Friday that the cut was much deeper than those targeting other UC programs and would raise Hastings' annual tuition from $28,600 to about $36,600.
Leno said the cut could launch a costly court fight over terms of the law school's creation, which called for Judge S.C. Hastings to donate $100,000 to support the campus - and for the state to pay his heirs that sum, plus interest, if the state ever abandoned its financial support.
Leno said the governor is attempting to "privatize" the law school, and if the Hastings heirs sued, the state could wind up owing more from 130 years of accumulated interest than it could save from its budget-cutting proposal.
Seriously, did anyone in the Governor's office even think about the possibility of paying 130 YEARS' WORTH of accumulated interest on a $100,000 contribution in order to save $10 million, and how those numbers do not compute?
I think you can see where this goes. The conference committee is not nearly in the mood to accept the most extreme of the Governor's proposals - I don't think they'll tell those AIDS activists in the streets that they can no longer get their drugs, for example. And then we'll have a fairly large remaining gap after the committee's work is done. The first pot of money the budget committee will attack will be the absurdly large $4.5 billion reserve in the Governor's plan, essentially ignoring the will of the people not to institute a spending cap and socking away billions of dollars in the middle of a near-depression. After that, we're going to see a big fight. We need to continue to leverage grassroots pressure, wedge Republicans who are starting to waver on a cuts-only approach, and let Democrats know that they must hold the line on things like eliminating welfare and children's health care, and incorporate a majority-vote fee increase to make up the difference. We're already seeing cracks in the rush to shock doctrine California. Let's break it open.
Apologies to Russell from Fat Albert, but in this case I mean that literally.
The Los Angeles Unified School District announced Thursday it is canceling the bulk of its summer school programs, the latest in a statewide wave of cutbacks expected to leave hundreds of thousands of students struggling for classes.
The reductions, which will force many parents to scramble for child care, are the most tangible effect of the multibillion-dollar state financial cuts to education. Community colleges also have announced summer program cancellations.
Bridge learning has a direct throughline to academic achievement, and in the long run, the value of getting an at-risk youth a high school diploma far outweighs short-term spending. But of course, summer-school programs extend beyond make-up classes for students behind the curve, but also playground and pool programs which keep kids out of trouble and off the streets. In other words, the very kind of after-school programs that the Governor championed before he took office.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's plan to dismantle the Cal Grant program would make California the first state in the recession-battered nation to eliminate student financial aid while raising college tuition, experts said this week.
"Other states are cutting back, but not a complete phase-out," said Haley Chitty, communications director for the National Assn. of Student Financial Aid Administrators.
The governor's proposal would end all new Cal Grants, eventually eliminating the state's main financial aid program for college students, and prevent existing awards from increasing. Grants awarded to 118,000 freshmen starting college in the fall would be canceled, as well as hikes in 82,255 continuing awards promised when the University of California and California State University raised fees this month by 10% and 9.3%, respectively.
Cal Grants awards focus on the lower-income population. That's on whom this budget is being balanced.
Arnold will deliver a joint address to the legislature this week. I'd rather that be a joint address to all public school students. Explain this to them.
I don't know how many times I have read this kind of article this decade, but it's still once too often:
Facing a significant budget shortfall, the University of California plans to increase tuition at its 10 campuses by nearly 10 percent by July, in time for the summer session.
The proposed 9.3 percent fee increase would raise basic tuition for undergraduate students from $7,126 a year to about $7,789. In addition, various student services fees are also expected to rise....
Birgeneau said middle-class families will bear the brunt of the tuition increase.
Under the proposal, families earning more than $100,000 would pay the full fee increase. Families earning from $60,000 to $100,000 would pay half the fee increase, or about 4.65 percent. Families earning less than $60,000 would not be subject to the fee increase.
Even considering this graduated level of increased tuition, the price is unsustainable. An annual tuition of $7,500 is out of the reach of most families, period. It's nearly double what I paid from 1996 to 2000, and is a 570% increase over what a UC grad would have paid from 1961 to 1965. Student loans might make up the difference, but those are much more difficult to get during a credit crunch and even if you can get one, they'll be an anchor around your neck for decades, preventing you from finding financial security.
Although the UC and CSU systems (which are likely to follow UC in making their own fee increases soon) remain officially public entities, they have been effectively privatized over time, as their funding now depends on private giving or student payments. The state contribution is now becoming almost incidental - with this recent budget nearly 80% of UC funding is coming from sources other than the state of California.
Even with the massive fee increases, educational quality isn't necessarily going to be sustained. New faculty hires are going to be dramatically scaled back, meaning new profs who bring new ideas and fresh blood to the university - and who often bring the best teaching to the classroom - will be fewer in number.
The original goal of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education was to guarantee access to college and affordability for those who were qualified in order to grow the middle class in California. It worked spectacularly, creating one of the leading economies of the globe over the last 50 years. But in the last 20 years this has begun to ebb, as fewer people can afford higher ed. And as the California Budget Project's study A Generation of Inequality found, young college educated Californians have had a harder time finding work than those with just a high school diploma while they are saddled with debts they cannot pay off.
In Vietnam they "destroyed the village in order to save it." Here in California, it seems clear that the goal is just to destroy higher education and the economic mobility and the foundation of the middle class along with it. It's time for us to determine how to reverse this trend.
It was hard to follow what was in and out of the budget in those final hours, but as it turned out, the oil severance tax, which at some point was part of the negotiations, ended up out of it. So we remain the only oil-producing state in the country to not charge corporations for taking our natural resources out of the ground. Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico is trying to change that by introducing a bill that would tax oil companies and use the proceeds to fund higher education. This was first reported on John Myers' Twitter feed, but now California Chronicle has a full report.
With California spending almost as much incarcerating inmates in prisons as it does educating students in higher education, Assembly Majority Leader Alberto Torrico introduced legislation today to expand funding for community colleges, the California State University and University of California.
"California is on the wrong track heading in the wrong direction," Majority Leader Torrico said. "Our prisons are overflowing and yet we are turning away students at our universities. The Master Plan for Higher Education is becoming a distant memory. This is not a sustainable path for California. We must invest more in higher education. It is a solid down payment on our economic future."
The recently passed state budget contained a 10 percent across the board cut for the UC and CSU systems and reductions for community colleges.
The increased funding from the bill, AB 656, would be derived from a severance tax on oil extracted within California. California, the third-largest oil producing state in the country, is the only state where oil is extracted without a tax.
"My bill will bring California in line with more than 20 other oil-extracting states," Torrico said. "When other states are charging over 12 percent from multi-billion dollar oil companies, we should be doing more to receive funds for our natural resources."
While I'd rather put the money into the General Fund rather than a specific sector, I can't imagine a more rational and simple idea. Nevertheless, I'm sure the Yacht Party will try to block it, as they did successfully last year. That can be a useful vote for the future ("Which side are you on, students or the oil companies"), but it does nothing to move us forward. Only by ending the conservative veto can common-sense solutions like this help California progress.
First, the good news: Californians want a quality education system from top to bottom:
Nearly all Californians across regional, political, and demographic groups say that higher education is very or somewhat important to the state's future economic vitality and quality of life. Latinos (80%) and blacks (74%) are the most likely to say it is very important. (PPIC
And they think we have a pretty good one now:
Californians give high grades to all three branches of the higher education system: community college (51% good, 15% excellent), California State University (52% good, 10% excellent), University of California (50% good, 15% excellent).(PPIC
Unsurprisingly, cost is labeled as the top concern, with a huge majority (84%) saying it's a problem. And large majorities favor specific programs to make education cheaper, such as a sliding scale and work-study programs. Furthermore, it seems that there is a lack of education about financial aid opportunities, especially in where it's needed most, families with low household incomes.
The bad news: While there is clearly a lot of work to be done, but apparently higher education is a bit lower down the line, behind K-12 education and human services, anyway. It's true that K-12 needs a lot of attention, we must not grow complacent about higher ed. The more concerning part is something more global: the budget and taxes. Namely, we're still a little unsure about the whole raising. It's classic, "And a Pony" thinking.
Today, most Californians (83%) are concerned that the budget crisis will lead to significant cuts in funding for higher education, and more than half (54%) say spending for public colleges and universities should be a high or very high priority. Yet more than half (52%) are unwilling to pay higher taxes or to increase student fees (62%) in order to avoid such cuts. However, about half (53%) favor spending more state government money to avoid increasing tuition and fees - even if it means less money for other state programs.
Part of the discrepancy has to be in the way you ask these questions. Because you can't really, over the phone, lay out the entirety of the budget system and ask people where the money should go. So instead we get a series of questions that goes something like this: Do you want to spend more money for a strong higher ed system? Yes. Do you want to spend more money on better K-12 education? Yes. Do you want to pay taxes for them? No.
Well, I simplify somewhat, but nonetheless this is tough to poll. So, I think the "And A Pony" thinking is somewhat overblown, but not entirely mythical. It certainly exists, but other recent polling shows that Californians are now willing to pay increased taxes. Back in September, Field reported (PDF) that over 60% of Californians favored some sort of tax increases to help balance the budget.
There is a will, we just need to make sure that everybody up and down the line understands that. As Jean Ross & the Budget Project point out in a new report (PDF), now is exactly the right time to invest in the future. We shouldn't be cutting back, but investing so that California will be the first to recover.
