Time was, any activist worth his salt could rally a campus by shouting Marx’s famous phrase: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!”
Today, I call upon students to rally behind that banner once again. Unite, I say, for increased student fees!
Now hear me out before you rebut.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, raising fees is the only way to ensure quality education remains accessible to low and middle-income students during this year’s budget crisis. By using new revenues from fees to give aid to the needy, we can create a fairer system in which higher-income students pay more according to their ability, and the lower- and middle-class get subsidized according to their needs.
Right now, the state faces a sizeable deficit. In order to cut costs, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing to cut payments to the UC by 3.4 percent from last year’s budget, leaving the regents more than $400 million short of their proposed budget for the next academic year.
Barring any new taxes or a massive inflow of donor money, new funds will have to come from fees, at least $490 per undergrad. Believe it or not, that’s in all of our best interests.
Freezing fees without identifying a new source of revenue to meet the budget shortfall, as the University of California Students Association is advocating, could seriously hurt low-income students. It would amount to “a transfer of income from the poor to the rich,” said Robert Birgeneau, chancellor of UC Berkeley , who chairs the UC Affordability Workgroup, which was convened by the regents last year.
The trouble is that most money for student aid comes from fees. If you freeze fees, you freeze the amount of aid available. Doing so puts low-income students who rely on aid to attend the UCs in a dangerous bind. While their fees will not increase, other costs, such as housing and textbooks, will. With less aid to pay for these rising costs, they’ll be forced into more debt, and perhaps out of school. Higher-income students, on the other hand, will benefit because their total costs will increase less rapidly than they would have otherwise.
Raising fees avoids this injustice. Increased revenues from rich students can be used to compensate poor students for their increased fees. Indeed, this year, when fees increased 7 percent from last year, students whose families made less than $60,000 a year ““ 43 percent of all UC students ““ had their fee increases completely covered by new grant money.
Though fees have nearly doubled in the past six years, Birgeneau pointed out, graduation rates of low-income students have remained virtually the same.
So it’s pretty clear raising fees won’t hurt low-income students. Unfortunately, it could hurt middle-class students. These students, like first-year political science student Stephen Searles, have family incomes too high to qualify for federal and state grants, but too little in the bank to pay for college. In the end, these students tend to take out large loans.
For Searles, this poses a problem. “I’m strongly considering a job in public service,” he said, but those jobs won’t easily pay off his loans.
Another student in a similar bind, Gregory Cendana, UCSA’s campus organizing director at UCLA, has had to work long hours through college.
“If I’m not at a meeting or in class, I’m at work,” he said. With a schedule like that, when can one study?
Under the current aid system, fee hikes would hurt these students because the UC would increase their costs without giving them aid as compensation. Birgeneau, however, has an idea to get around this. Following the recent moves of Harvard and Yale to offer aid packages to their middle-class students, he proposed the UC expand its grant program to reach more middle-class students. This could be funded, in large part, by increased fees. If the aid program is designed well, middle-class students might even benefit from fee increases, getting more aid paid for by higher-income students.
It seems the best strategy to keep the UC accessible, therefore, is to raise fees, in order to fund more aid for the middle class and those normally excluded from grant money, such as undocumented students. The only students who will lose out are those who can afford to pay a little more anyway.
In the long run, the state needs a new way to generate revenue for education. The folks at Tuition Relief Now, for which Searles organizes, are trying to qualify a ballot initiative for November that would ban fee increases while raising around $600 million for the UC by taxing millionaires. This could be enough to solve the budget shortfall without raising fees, a better outcome by far. Until something like that initiative passes, however, increased fees with increased aid remain the best way to keep the UC excellent and affordable.
Willing to increase your fees? Let Reed know at treed@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to