Make UC affordable again for all of us
We used to call them “Hey, Martha” stories.
As when a hubby would be reading the paper in his breakfast nook and find a tale therein so compelling that he would call across the room to
... you know, Martha, frying his eggs.
Now there aren't enough hubbies or Marthas reading the newspapers. But clearly there are still some Hey, Martha stories out there, because last month the excellent longtime education reporter for the Los Angeles Times, Teresa Watanabe, wrote one so compelling that the reader response to it changed a young man's life in a forever way.
She wrote about Jonathan Cornejo, a senior at West Adams Preparatory High School in central Los Angeles: “The son of a single immigrant mother from El Salvador, he had no home Wi-Fi or working laptop for stretches at a time or a study space in the family's cramped apartment . ... Yet Jonathan overcame those challenges to earn a 4.0 GPA while serving as student body president and yearbook editor in chief. His perseverance paid off last month when he received a coveted admission offer from his dream school, toprated UC San Diego.”
Except he couldn't go, `cause it costs way too much money to attend the University of California these days. There's the $14,000 in annual tuition, a high enough hurdle — but it's the $38,000 total cost what with food and lodging and a giant bureaucracy to feed. A system that used to be, if not quite free, so cheap it forces old grads such as me to spin almost impossiblesounding yarns about the $637 annual tuition of the mid-1970s.
Anyway, so many readers wrote in after Watanabe's story appeared offering to help close the $4,000 gap for Cornejo and his mom that he's heading for La Jolla after all.
And, talk about your Hey, Marthas. The story went right to the top, as UC President Michael Drake was asked about Jonathan's plight at a state Senate committee hearing. He told the legislators that the university was upping its financial aid and “could usually find a way to help close affordability gaps.”
My head was spinning when I read the crazy amount of paperwork and loan applications Jonathan had had to fill out initially only to find out he couldn't afford to go. I side with the cranks on this: Shouldn't universities work on the cost side of this equation, rather than on finding more and more Pell Grants and other scholarships to pay the bills? As CalMatters has reported, undergraduate fees at UC grew at nearly five times the rate of inflation between my graduation year, 1977, and 2018.
I can side with the cranks and still be appalled by the attitude of Gov. Ronald Reagan, who started the trend toward higher tuition because he didn't like what he termed the “beatniks” at Berkeley and said it wasn't the state of California's job “to subsidize intellectual curiosity.” To me, that's the best possible subsidy a state could make.
But these costs can't keep going up. It's unsustainable. And, yes, I realize how affordable our community colleges are, and know the practical thing to do is to spend the first two years of college there, then transfer. But Jonathan's own high school counselor notes the reality behind that “practical” myth: a lot of students who go to commuter and (supposed) two-year colleges drop out for lack of focus.
Lose the offices of student experience. Make the cafeteria sushi just a little worse. Sell off the massive UC president's office and let the campuses run themselves. Build more student housing by YIMBYing the NIMBYs who stop dorms from being built in People's Park. Subsidize intellectual curiosity. Because there are a lot of Jonathans out there who don't get written about, and I want them to have what I had: a life-enhancing four years of learning.