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While most of us will be proud of the UCLA diplomas hanging on
our office walls, future Bruins may not be so lucky.
Our quality of education is being severely threatened by
overcrowding and underfunding. If the UC system is not careful, it
will lapse into the same state as the rest of California’s
education system. The UC will become a larger-scale Los Angeles
Unified School District that will be huge, inefficient and
lousy.
A report will be released next month that indicates the
university needs to spend up to $215 million annually to attract
more qualified graduate students to its programs. It also needs to
add 11,000 graduate students to remain competitive with other
universities across the nation. Right now, those graduate students
aren’t coming to the UC because the system can’t offer
them attractive financial packages.
As we struggle for more graduate students to maintain our
reputation, UCLA continues to be the most applied-to school in the
nation for undergraduates. The undergraduate population has doubled
over the last three decades, while the graduate population has only
increased by 7 percent. If this continues, we’ll have
60-person discussion sections lead by a single overworked and
underpaid teaching assistant.
But the UC’s graduate student issues are confounded by
other university woes.
The UC expects an increased student population of more than
60,000 to occur over the next 10 years. At the same time,
they’re being asked by the state to conduct budget cuts in
the neighborhood of $450 million for the next fiscal year. These
two problems are tugging at administrators who have yet to provide
a solution.
The UC system ““ and the state government ““ have
failed to account for California’s growth. We saw it when
they didn’t build enough power plants during the energy
crisis, and we’re seeing it now in our schools. Except we
can’t “cut back” university usage in an effort to
conserve education.
Right now the UC system is respected as an academic powerhouse,
particularly its Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses. We compete with
private schools like Harvard and Stanford for recognition, but
while the big private colleges can pick students from all over the
nation, we have an obligation to California students first ““
and that population is expanding more rapidly than we may be able
to accommodate.
We have to find a way to accept these students without
undermining the quality of a UC education. We need to explore all
possible options, even if it means cutting money from other parts
of the state’s budget.
In doing this, though, quality education should remain the
state’s top priority.
The university needs to continue exploring all possible
solutions to its web of problems. This investigation should also
include the effects that capping undergraduate enrollment would
have on the individual UC campuses and whether this could ease the
UC’s dilemma. Accepting less undergraduate students will
allow the university to reserve funding that can make the UC more
attractive to the nation’s top graduate students. The elite
stature of Berkeley and UCLA cannot be compromised if we expect to
remain a competitive school with competitive research.
Now, more than ever, it’s important that the UC system
remember that every qualified California student deserves a quality
California education. But it can’t happen if every California
student is sitting on top of each other in a single classroom.