In reversal, UC regents put off proposal to raise tuition
In an extraordinary turnaround, the University of California regents postponed a vote Wednesday that could have increased annual tuition and fees above $14,000 for the first time next fall.
The last-minute change came shortly after Gov. Jerry Brown sent a letter urging the regents to “reject outright” the increase.
UC President Janet Napolitano did not refer to the governor as she announced the decision to table the vote. But she said the students who opposed the increase — and who promised to join UC officials in lobbying Sacramento for additional funding — and state lawmakers had influenced the decision.
“After hearing from students and the Legislature, I think the board would be better advised to defer voting on this item until its May meeting,” Napolitano said at the meeting in San Francisco. She said a vote on raising out-of-state tuition could take place in March.
The regents had been widely expected to approve a price hike of nearly 3 percent, to $12,972 a year, for an increase of $342. With campus fees, California undergrads would have paid more than $14,300 — not counting room, board and books. Students from California families earning less than $80,000 a year pay no tuition.
Out-of-state students faced a potential increase of 3.5 percent in tuition, to nearly $30,000 a year.
In his letter, Brown called a tuition increase “premature.” He said state support for UC has grown by $1.2 billion since 2012, and urged them to reduce costs instead of “increasing the financial burden on students.”
Brown, who opposes tuition increases at UC and at the California State University, where the trustees expect to consider a tuition increase in March, has appointed several of the regents in recent years. And for the first time in years, if ever, it appeared the regents had too few votes to raise the price. Now, three more regents are retiring — Norman Pattiz, Bruce Varner and William De La Peña — leaving the board even more open to the governor’s influence.
Nearly 3,000 students had signed a petition opposing the tuition increase, including Kylie Murdock, a UC Berkeley sophomore who addressed the regents before their decision at the UCSF Mission Bay campus.
“While $342 may seem like a drop in the bucket to many, it’s a lot to me,” said Murdock, wearing a T-shirt with the words, “The fees are too damn high.” The increase “is a semester of textbooks. It’s a round-trip plane ticket to visit my family.”
Students were delighted at the delay.
“It’s time for students, the university and the state to work together to make college more, not less, affordable,” Rigel Robinson, a UC Berkeley student senator, told The Chronicle.
UC finance officials said it would take $50 million for the state to buy out the tuition increase. Regent John Pérez, a Brown appointee who opposes tuition increases, said later that UC could raise the money through cost-cutting and better revenue strategies.
But it was clear that the regents were deeply divided over the question.
“If we have to keep cutting, cutting, cutting, we will dangerously impair the quality of the university,” said Regent Sherry Lansing, who has traditionally voted for the tuition increases that have doubled tuition and fees in the last decade from $6,500 to about $13,000.