A Crown Jewel of Education Struggles With Cuts in California

[tonysam]

BERKELEY, Calif. — As the University of California struggles to absorb its sharpest drop in state financing since the Great Depression, every professor, administrator and clerical worker has been put on furlough amounting to an average pay cut of 8 percent.

In chemistry laboratories that have produced Nobel Prize-winning research, wastebaskets are stuffed to the brim on the new reduced cleaning schedule. Many students are frozen out of required classes as course sections are trimmed.

And on Thursday, to top it all off, the Board of Regents voted to increase undergraduate fees — the equivalent of tuition — by 32 percent next fall, to more than $10,000. The university will cost about three times as much as it did a decade ago, and what was once an educational bargain will be one of the nation’s higher-priced public universities.

Among students and faculty alike, there is a pervasive sense that the increases and the deep budget cuts are pushing the university into decline.


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It's not just K-12 that's under siege.

[villager]

1. My alma mater, R.I.P.

Thanks a fuck of a lot, GOP & weak-kneed Democrats...

[imdjh]

4. That's too easy. A person needs to know where the money went.

There is no reason the school should be in trouble because the tax base in faltering. We're probably talking about upwards of $200,000,000 in the budget for this place. And if we aren't, then it's because they have been giving away the house, and now the bill is due.

[villager]

5. to be sure, some of the R.I.P-ing was abetted by crass administration...

n/t

[imdjh]

2. In the midst of this theater, might a reasonable person wonder where the money goes?

The University of Florida, Florida State, and University Of South Florida are also crying poor right now, but they are crying poor on tuitions that are a fraction of the University of California. Yes, yes, we all know how difficult it is to survive in California, where over priced real estate is a tax on the poor but insistent Californian.

Where is the money going? Where has it been going?

35000 students paying an average of $5000/yr, would be a budget of $175 MILLION. One hundred seventy five million dollars. And that is just on the low average, not including all the nickel and dimes they squeeze out of you.

[Hannah Bell]

7. The University of California,

recognized worldwide for its academic distinction, includes more than 220,000 students, 170,000 faculty and staff, and an $18 billion annual budget at its 10 campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, Merced, Riverside, San Diego, San Francisco, Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara.

The university offers programs in more than 150 disciplines, many of which are ranked among the top 10 nationally, and for the last 12 years has generated more patents than any other university in the nation.

UC's five medical centers support the clinical teaching programs of the university's medical and health sciences schools and handle more than three million patient visits each year. The UC system also is involved in managing the U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories at Berkeley, Livermore and Los Alamos.

[FBaggins]

9. Can those numbers really be correct???

If so... there's more here than just a state budget problem.

It can't possibly take 170,000 faculty members to educate 220,000 students. That's off by an order of magnitude, right? It doesn't matter how you tweat tuition, 220 college kids and their parents can't support 170 university professors (etc).

There there's the $18 Billion annual budget. Could that be their endowment and not their budget? That would seem high even for an endowment balance. If both figures are correct then they're saying they spend almost $82,000 per student each year. Can that be right? If so... the state may have made a bunch of mistakes, but the university needs to be a little more rational.

I got a kick out of the NYTimes "making the most of your money" guy (Lieber?). His advice is for some of these kids to take a year off from school, live at home, and get a job. Then they (and/or their parents) would save a year of tuition and they would easily bank five figures in savings to help pay for higher tuition when they get back.

Yeah... that's the ticket... anyone out there can tell you that now is a GREAT time to go out and get a job.

[tonysam]

11. I suspect a huge chunk of the "faculty" are researchers

UC is a MAJOR research institution. Note the post also mentions "staff," which includes maintenance workers, clerical staff, and other classified employees.

[Hannah Bell]

12. "faculty and STAFF": with some of the staff consisting of grad student ta's,

research assistants, med school residents, etc. the system includes hospitals & research facilities, & its budget includes income fom these sources as well as from private tuition.

compare equivalent private sector cost (& quality) to peform the same functions.

[imdjh]

10. Wow. Thanks, it's worse than I thought.

I was only talking about Berkeley with my 35,000 figure. As the other poster said, your numbers make the situation look even more insane.

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

3. How much are they cutting administrative salaries?

I went to UCI and then to UCLA a long time ago, when it was cheap. But I shook my head at the fact that the place was swiss-cheesed with office, after office, after office full of secretaries, clerks, and school administrators and I wondered how they could afford to pay all of that. A 32% increase in tuition out of the blue is astonishing to me. They're really beyond stupid if they let this great university system fall apart.

[tularetom]

6. The fund raising letters I get from the alumni association have increased

Both in frequency and desperation in recent years.

There are a lot of villains in this sorry mess, including schwarzenegger, cowardly politicians who would rather build more prisons than invest in the state's future, the regents who keep paying obscene salaries to professors and administrators, the taxpayers of CA who never fail to vote for any tax cutting measure that appears on the ballot.

When I graduated over 40 years ago, it was a school where students of any income level could afford to attend as long as they met the academic requirements. They've already frozen out the poor and they're making pretty good progress on keeping the middle class out too.

Still it's a better deal than that other joint across the bay where the tuition is approaching $40k per year.

[donco6]

8. Same thing happening here, too.

Univ of Colorado/Boulder - huge tuition increase. Staff cuts. Probably another 6% cut to overall higher ed funding.