CSU trustees OK 1st boost in tuition since 2011

Many undergrads protest increase of $270 per year

Over the objections of student protesters wearing graduation robes and signs showing their student-loan debt, California State University trustees narrowly approved tuition increases Wednesday for the first time since 2011.

“There is zero joy in this,” said Trustee Peter Taylor, chairman of the board’s Finance Committee, as he blamed the tuition increase on insufficient state funding. He said he would vote for the increase because “CSU is not as good as it used to be . ... We are being asked to choose between quality and (college) access.”

Students in the audience at CSU’s Long Beach headquarters booed.

The increase takes effect in the fall. Undergraduate tuition will grow by 5 percent, adding $270 and bringing the yearly price to $5,472,

not counting books and board. Graduate students will receive a 6.5 percent increase, adding $438 a year and raising tuition to $7,176.

This is the first year since 2011 that CSU can raise tuition under Gov. Jerry Brown’s multiyear plan for the university, which guaranteed funding increases of at least 4 percent from 2013 to 2017 if the trustees kept tuition flat.

Most undergraduates won’t have to pay the increase. Sixty-three percent, or about 255,000 students, receive financial aid in the form of grants or waivers that cover full tuition and do not have to be repaid. The remaining 170,000 students are from families that earn too much for the subsidies.

Yet many of those students say they already work two jobs and are overburdened by student-loan debt.

Busloads of students began arriving in Long Beach at 5:30 a.m. Wednesday to oppose the plan that is expected to raise $77.5 million for CSU. The funds would pay for nearly half of an expected shortfall of $168 million.

“Please, I beg of you to vote no on the tuition increase!’ sociology major Esman Asher told the trustees. She wore a sign saying she owed $60,000 in student loans.

Unlike years past, when the trustees raised tuition by higher amounts, students broke no windows Wednesday, and no one was arrested. They still made their objections known, with about 50 outside the auditorium and 40 inside.

“What about the students?” the protesters cried, interrupting the trustees’ discussion of a building plan for Cal State San Marcos. And to Chancellor Timothy White, who proposed the tuition increase, they cried: “Chancellor White! Do what’s right!”

Students said that even a seemingly small increase would impact them harshly.

“We are hanging by a thread. Grants and loans still don’t cover expenses,” Celia LoBuono Gonzalez, a student from San Francisco State, told the trustees. “Some students eat only one time a day.”

Chief financial officer Steve Relyea told the trustees the higher price was needed to advance CSU’s plan for graduating an additional 500,000 students in 10 years, doubling the current rate.

“Students don’t need this graduation initiative!” San Jose State student Iritzi Torres Mendoza told the trustees. “They need mental health services!”

Eight trustees of the 19 trustees on the board voted against the tuition increase, including Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom; Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Los Angeles; and state schools chief Tom Torlakson.

“We’ve got to make better decisions,” Newsom said, telling his colleagues they shouldn’t “do the job of the Legislature and the governor,” which is to fund CSU.

Rendon said, “It’s absurdly ironic that a week ago in the state Assembly we held a conference about debtfree college education and now we’re talking about fee increases.”

But in the end, most trustees said they reluctantly agreed with the chancellor that the Legislature is unlikely to give CSU the money it needs, and that higher tuition is the way to close the gap. As students shouted: “No justice! No peace,” Gonzalez told a reporter: “I feel betrayed.”