When I first heard of Chancellor Albert Carnesale’s plan
to raise student fees at UCLA to $15,000 or $20,000 a year to
maintain its status as a first-rate university, I must admit my
reaction was one of outrage and frustration. I found it difficult
to believe that such a preposterous suggestion came from one of our
chancellors rather than an administrator from one of University of
California’s “competitor” universities.
After mulling it over, I realized the chancellor’s plan to
more than double student fees had already occurred in recent
history. When I was an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, fees nearly
doubled between 1992 and 1994. If I had started at Cal two years
earlier, my fees would have risen over 200 percent from the time I
first enrolled to my graduation.
These steep fee hikes were a response to a now all too familiar
scenario ““ California was in recession, and the state
government responded by pulling funding from students and severely
cutting UC funds. Not only did fees increase, but student services
were cut, class sizes got larger, and it became harder and harder
to get into classes. Sound familiar?
The last several classes of students have suffered the
consequences of this destructive cycle in which students are paying
more and more for what is supposed to be state-subsidized, quality
public education. The state has clearly deviated from the
principles of the California Master Plan for Higher Education.
The master plan was crafted in 1959 when California faced a baby
boom, a wavering economy and a variety of colleges and universities
that were eager to grow. Then-UC President Clark Kerr led an effort
to develop and eventually legislate a system that guaranteed access
to higher education for every California high school graduate.
Every graduate who qualified for the UC would have a place in
the university, students who qualified for the California State
Universities would have a place in the state universities and all
high school graduates could go to community colleges.
Most importantly, the state and its citizens would invest in and
support its students by subsidizing the cost of their education.
But the access provisions of the master plan have since been
undermined and students disenfranchised as student fees have
skyrocketed in the past dozen or so years.
The UC Student Association strives to keep alive the promise of
the master plan by working for UC accessibility, affordability and
quality. Over the last several years, just as in the early 1990s,
the state budget has made clear that higher education access,
affordability and quality will not be a priority unless we students
make it one.
Enrollment and eligibility caps, fee hikes and compacts
characterize the university’s desperate attempts to overcome
the widening gap between what the state does provide and what it
should be providing for the university under the master plan. A
series of further fee increases to overcome the deficit is not the
reasonable and responsible way to ensure the enrollment of all
qualified students, the restoration of eroding quality and
certainly not the affordability of the university.
Student fees are already prohibitive for many deserving
California residents, even without the added financial burden
Chancellor Carnesale proposed to place on students and their
families.
Does California really want a public higher education system
that fails to take the best and brightest, and instead keeps only
those who can pay fees that are guaranteed to rise every year in
the foreseeable future?
A high-fee, high-aid model of higher education financing is a
total departure from the master plan ““ a plan that served
California well in the last 40 years and has done much to make
California the global economic powerhouse it is today.
It also may well be unsupportable in our rapidly growing state,
where increasing numbers of Californians are qualified for and
eager to attend the UC and have already paid for their public
education through tax dollars. California is growing, and the
university must grow accordingly if the UC is to be the premier
public university system in the nation.
We must look frankly at our university and see that under
current budget conditions and priorities it cannot sustain its
accessibility, affordability and quality. The state must answer the
needs of its higher education systems. The citizens of California
must reaffirm their commitment to quality public education and the
promise of the master plan.
An affordable, not exorbitant, public higher education is a
benefit to all Californians. Join with UC students system-wide as
the UC Student Association calls on our state and university
leadership to make higher education funding a budget priority.
Lilla is the president of UC Student Association. She is a
graduate student in biomedical sciences at UC San
Francisco.