California public colleges are gearing up to weather a storm. With dwindling state financial support and an onslaught of qualified students, UCs and CSUs are about to be bursting at the seams.
Unless, of course, they take fewer students. Recently seven California State Universities moved up their application deadlines in the hopes that qualified students would miss them.
Why would a university do that? Because Cal State Los Angeles, Sacramento, Monterey Bay, San Bernardino, Dominguez Hills, Bakersfield and East Bay cannot afford any more students.
The UC Office of the President released a statement on Thursday outlining the university’s dismal budget situation, likely to be a precursor to the upcoming UC Board of Regents meeting, when they will be discussing fees and enrollment.
The regents have already alluded to fee increases and stalling out UC enrollment; some of these decisions may be finalized at their March meeting at UC San Francisco.
Luckily, the UC analysts think we can support all of the students who are UC-eligible for this year’s application cycle, but not for very much longer. And we certainly won’t be increasing enrollment.
The California Legislative Analysis Office also recommends UC and CSU fee increases of 10 percent as part of its budget analysis ““ making it more likely that we will be paying several hundred dollars more for school next year.
Many of the best CSUs in the state are hiding from their applicants, the UC won’t be increasing enrollment, and the state is slashing higher-education budgets.
In the midst of this crisis, a handful of the most selective universities in the country, such as Stanford, Brown and Harvard, are boosting their aid to lower- and middle-income students ““ in some cases offering a free ride to students with a low enough income.
The regents, as well as most of the UC campuses, have stressed the need to maintain the university’s affordability and accessibility to lower-income and underrepresented students.
Schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley are competing with schools like Stanford and the Ivys for these same high-achieving low-income and minority students.
One of our largest advantages has been the low cost of a UC education. The university has recently been stressing the “return to aid” program, by which about one-third of all student fees go back to financial aid for students who cannot afford their education.
The program is great, and actually helps reduce the cost of education for those students. But it’s only one part of a financial aid package that usually includes large student loans, ensuring these students will be in debt when they graduate.
These aid packages also usually don’t cover the full cost of housing, groceries, books and school supplies. So when a low-income student gets into UCLA and Stanford, and is offered a full ride from Stanford ““ the choice will probably be obvious.
State legislators continually demand that the UC student body be representative of the state population in terms of financial and ethnic diversity. The bottom line is that if we have to compete with wealthier schools for those students, we will lose.
We have said this before, and we will say this again: Don’t raise fees, and increase state funding for higher education.