WHY CSU TUITION HIKES DEMAND SCRUTINY
In 2009, when the Great Recession forced California’s revenue roller coaster to take a dizzying plunge, the University of California system made clear it wanted no part of any belt-tightening — even as its direct state funding was limited. Seven years later, a shocking state audit showed how UC — which has more autonomy than virtually any other state agency because of provisions in the California Constitution — pulled this off. Its leaders quietly changed their admissions policies, sharply increasing the number of out-of-state and international students who paid vastly higher tuition. The audit detailed how this decision led to the rejection of nearly 4,300 in-state UC applicants with academic records as good or better than the median records of admitted nonresidents.
Now is it the California State University system’s turn to punish in-state students due to its present financial circumstances — also without doing much belt-tightening? With trustees’ recent 15-5 vote to impose a 6 percent annual tuition increase for the next five years — meaning a cumulative 33 percent increase — it’s worth considering. For full-time undergraduate students, tuition will go from $5,742 to $7,682 in 2028-29, according to CSU. The harsh impact of this on students and their families was downplayed by CSU officials who say financial aid will continue to cover the entire tuition costs of some 60 percent of the 460,000 students in the CSU system. But that still hammers the other 40 percent — more than 180,000 students — most of whom do not come from affluent families. Given the evidence that nearly 50,000 CSU students are homeless and that 90,000-plus are “food insecure,” trustees’ decision can be fairly described as a brutal blow to those they’re supposed to care the most about.
To be clear, what CSU plans to do isn’t remotely as galling as what UC did — which was nothing less than a secretive betrayal of its responsibilities to California high school students. There is no question that expenses related to maintaining CSU’s 23 often-sprawling campuses have surged — or that these costs have gone up by more on a percentage basis than the increases in state aid provided by the Legislature under Govs. Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown.
But by far the biggest increase in costs has come in employee pay and benefits, which eat up more than 70 percent of the budget in the nation’s largest public university system. While much attention has been paid to the sharp compensation increases given to CSU campus presidents in recent years, total costs have gone up far more in another employment category. As faculty union leaders have documented, the CSU system is only one of many across the nation that has seen an explosion in the number of administrators — growth that far exceeds increases in enrollment. In 2012, CSU employed about 3,300 administrators. According to a CSU fact sheet, that number now stands at 4,510 — an increase of about 33 percent. Over the same stretch, total enrollment went up less than 8 percent. It took much longer, but the sort of bloat that has been evident in UC since the 1990s has now arrived at its sister institution.
It’s hard to see how can this be justified — this increase in the college bureaucrats dubbed “deanlets” by Johns Hopkins University professor Benjamin Ginsberg. There’s no evidence that it is in response to student or public demand. And the surge in spending that resulted is not trivial. The total annual compensation — including pension and health benefits — going to those 1,200 additional administrators isn’t a fact easily gleaned from CSU budget information that’s available online. But it’s almost certainly more than the $148 million CSU expects from its first year of tuition hikes.
Keep this in mind when the CSU trustees who supported the tuition kick in the stomach say they had no choice in the matter. If they fought the administrative bloat that’s occurred on their watch, their case for tuition increases would be stronger — and the increases they sought would have been significantly smaller.