San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
UC board to decide on tuition increase
Regents consider price hike only for new students
The University of California’s Board of Regents is picking up where it left off when the pandemic hit, and will vote Thursday on whether to raise undergraduate tuition for the first time since 2017, beginning a year from now.
The proposal is different from earlier tuition increases — which have often sparked huge student protests — because it would raise the price annually only on firstyear students and new transfer students, allowing them to keep that tuition level for up to six years. University officials hope that graduated approach will be more palatable for students than the doubledigit hikes that were common a decade ago at the height of the recession.
University officials are ask
ing the regents to raise tuition after the new state budget provided what they are calling the “largest state investment in UC’s history: more than $807 million.”
But most of the new money consists of onetime funds restricted to a specific purpose, and can’t be used to pay for salaries and other ongoing costs, said Stett Holbrook, a UC spokesperson.
Annual tuition for an undergraduate California resident is $11,442. Mandatory fees raise the yearly price to $12,570 — and then to $14,077 when fees from the nine undergraduate campuses are included.
Under the proposal, students entering UC in fall 2022 would pay an additional $534 in tuition and student fees for the duration of their enrollment. The increase equals average inflation over three years, plus 2%.
The amount charged above inflation would decrease for each new group of students until fall 2026, when the increase would be held at the rate of inflation alone.
“By eliminating annual uncertainty about how a student’s systemwide charges might change from one year to the next, the university would make it easier for students and families to develop a financing plan for the entirety of a student’s enrollment,” UC officials say in their proposal to the regents.
They also point out that 55% of undergraduates from California qualify for grant aid and pay no tuition or fees. The officials say their proposed “cohortbased tuition increase” would especially benefit needy students because the level of grant money available to them would grow faster than if tuition remained flat.
But students aren’t buying a sales pitch that says a tuition increase will save them money.
“The university is selling this almost as a donoharm tuition increase. But it isn’t,” said Aidan Arasasingham, outgoing president of the statewide UC Student Association, who just graduated from UCLA with a degree in global studies.
In the end, he said, a tuition increase is just that: a higher price, at least for many students — and especially those from middleincome families and students from outside of California, neither of whom qualify for financial aid.
“Nonresident students face the highest levels of food insecurity, and this (proposal) places UC above the price tag of the most gilded private school in the country,” Arasasingham said.
Nonresident UC undergraduates already pay about three times the price paid by state residents, or nearly $44,000 a year.
“We've been calling the tuition hike the ‘forever hike,’ ” said Josh Lewis, an incoming senior at UC Berkeley and chair of governmental relations at the UC Students Association.
Lewis criticized the proposal for locking in tuition hikes over six years without a builtin reassessment of its impacts during that time.
The tuition proposal authorizes UC President Michael Drake to reduce or eliminate the increase in any year where the state increases UC’s permanent base budget by at least 5%.
Without raising tuition, UC officials say an estimated shortfall of $241 million in 202223 is projected to grow to $694 million by 202627.
Their proposal says they “have made extraordinary efforts to identify costsaving opportunities” over the years, but funding per student has declined by 36% since 2000, even as the number of students has risen by 71%, to 292,207.
As a result, the university argues, UC has been forced to rely on fewer professors and on more lecturers, “resulting in fewer opportunities for undergraduate students to interact with worldclass researchers who can inspire and mentor the next generation.”
The officials also paint a picture of a university in dire financial straits. They say UC has had to dip into its facultyhiring funds to pay for campus maintenance, and that it can’t offer salaries high enough to attract support staff and doesn’t have the cash to replace equipment or modernize classrooms.
Holbrook said the state’s new, unrestricted funding for UC represents about a 2% increase in the university’s core funds, “wellshort of UC’s needs if we are to continue providing the quality education our students expect.”
The regents intended to vote on a similar tuition proposal in March 2020, but the pandemic knocked it off the table.
Base tuition has not changed since 2017, when it rose by $282, or 2.5% from the year before. The base price had been $11,160 since 2011, when it jumped by $1,818, or 19.5%, from the year before. Earlier, tuition increased every year but one since 2001.
Yet, when adjusted for inflation, today’s base price is more than triple the $2,716 it was in 2001.
Although the mandatory fees UC charges students on top of tuition have risen only when tuition also rises, other fees charged by campuses have been rising steadily. The average campus fee is now $1,507, up $54% from a decade ago.
The regents will also vote on multiyear tuition increases for graduate students, but the price would rise each year for all students and be pegged to the rate of inflation beginning with the 202223 academic year, UC said.