| Last Tuesday’s press
conference was a chance for Schwarzenegger to announce
the results of closed-door meetings with heads of the
University of California and California State University
systems. These deliberations, which other college officials
and representatives were not invited to or aware of,
produced what Schwarzenegger described as “a solution
acceptable to everyone.”
One must assume Schwarzenegger’s “everyone”
does not include the incoming UC or CSU freshmen classes.
Traditionally, students with qualifying SAT scores and
grades have been guaranteed enrollment in California’s
public universities; however, Schwarzenegger’s
plan to reduce incoming freshmen class sizes by 10 percent
will send several thousand qualified students back to
community colleges for at least the first two years
of their college educations. The actual number of rejected
students has been estimated at anywhere between 7,500
and 12,600.
Regardless of which college system they enroll in,
new students will be greeted with across-the-board tuition
increases. After a 60 percent increase in per-unit fees
in the past two years, California’s community
colleges will increase their tuition again, from $18
per unit in the 2003-04 year to $26 in 2004-05, or 70
percent.
Undergraduate fees at California’s public universities
also will be on the rise, with tuition fees increasing
14 percent next year. The next two years will be slightly
more lenient, with proposed 8 percent increases each
year.
At some point in the confidential deliberations, a
small victory was won for graduate students in the UC
system. Schwarzenegger’s original proposal of
a 40 percent increase in tuition over one year was cut
to 20 percent, followed by 10 percent increases each
year for the next two years. Incoming CSU graduate students
will be paying 25 percent more than last year’s
tuition, with rate increases set at “no less than
10 percent” per year in following years.
Perhaps the most discouraging detail of this list of
figures is where all these increased fees will not be
going: back to California’s students. Established
policy has been to earmark one-third of California’s
income from higher-education tuition for financial aid.
In other words, 33 percent of the universities’
profits went back into providing scholarships for lower-income
and first-generation college students. In the proposed
budget, that figure could be slashed to 20 percent.
The consequences of such a drastic reduction in financial
aid should be easy to figure, with or without a calculator.
Schwarzenegger’s performance at his press conference
was impressive, but unless he’s planning on ruling
a state of increasingly uneducated citizens, someone
needs to slip him a new script. We’ve seen him
play the triumphant politician; it’s long past
time for him to start acting like he cares about the
future of the state he’s governing.
For a listing of Meghan's past articles, visit her archive
page at http://www.rawstory.com/exclusives/mpurvis/.
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