Adam Enomoto
Staff Writer
A committee of the University of California’s governing board voted for a tuition increase during each of the next five years. The UC administration is asking the college students and their families to sacrifice more and more to pay for tuition, while fattening the pocketbooks of their own already highly compensated chancellors.That’s unfair to people in the real world of stressed taxpayers and parents struggling to pay their kids’ tuition.
Where UC officials have said the hike is necessary to sustain the “world class” and “public-serving” university system, Governor Jerry Brown and several elected officials who serve as regents have opposed the increase, calling for creative ways to reduce overall cost while still improving quality. Hundreds protested the regents’ meeting in San Fransisco on Wednesday and Thursday, aiming much of their frustrations at the regents and UC President Napolitano — former Arizona governor.
According to Sfgate, the state funds UC much less than it did even a generation ago. This is significant because a lot of people depended on receiving an excelent education for what’s is considered a reasonable price. In 1987, the state funded 54 percent of UC Berkeley’s budget. In 2013, the state supplied less than 12 percent of the UC system’s budget. In early November, UC President Janet Napolitano announced the plan to increase tuition 5 percent per year in 5 consecutive years that was approved at the UC Regents meeting. The state must take on more of a burden on paying for college education and they also need to look to having greater cost efficiencies.
This approval of the 5 percent increase in each of the next five years will be a devastating attack on the middle class. For the middle class, the prices of college are being raised, but their incomes are not. Therefore, there is less and less disposable income for the middle class. To add insult to injury, according to Sfgate, the UC’s executive-level administration also voted themselves a raise and are now receiving close to 20 percent more income. For students struggling with student loans of $20,000 a year, who are ending up with $80,000 in undergraduate student loans, the fact that regents would vote raises of that magnitude to three of the UC chancellors is appalling.
According to UCLA student Jason Jones, his concern is that the Universities of California are public universities so he hopes the state of California would fund it properly in order to invest in the future workforce of California. The UC’s should be affordable for California’s middle class because that’s the majority of people who pay taxes in order to fund these institutions.
It has been a decade of flat wages for the American middle class which means that any increases in tuition come out of disposable income. The best way to alleviate this predicament on the middle class is for the state government to step in and supply more money to the UC schools. It is necessary for California’s government to allocate more taxpayers’ dollars to UC funding.
The Board of Regents adopted the increase proposed by UC President Janet Napolitano with a 14-7 vote. According to Sacbee, the average annual cost of a UC education for California residents would go up $612 to $12,804 next fall and to $15,564 by fall 2019, which is a 27.7 percent increase from today’s tuition. Families can hardly afford public universities now even without the 30% increase.
According to Sacbee, If the full five percent increase is applied over each of the next five years, in-state and out-of-state students could be paying as much as $15,564 and $44,766 respectively in tuition and fees. It is unfair that student fees are the largest source of UC revenue since in previous years the state was able to supply a far greater percentage of the budget to the schools. This is not a sustainable solution for public education because it is putting a huge burden on the middle class.
No one wants to graduate from school with a mountain of debt. College is supposed to give students greater financial earning power; however, if one ends up with an insurmountable amount of debt from student loans, then it’s having the opposite effect.
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