We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all undergraduates are created equal.
Under the new University of California funding scheme set to be phased in over the next six years, the idea that all undergraduates should be equally funded is integral. But it misses a central truth: that all undergraduates are, in fact, not created equal.
The funding reform, dubbed with the unfortunate moniker of “rebenching,” assigns a financial weight to each type of student – one for resident undergraduates and professional graduates, 2.5 for doctoral students and five for health science students. For each student a given campus enrolls, it will receive an amount of funding weighted by those numbers; rebenching thus lumps all undergraduate students into a single category.
So while rebenching would seek to equalize state funding per student across the UC campuses by allocating money based on basic enrollment numbers, it would do so in a heavy-handed and uncompromising manner.
The problem is that this type of simplified funding scheme fails to account for the many differences among students pursuing different disciplines at the same course level. In addition, it extends these approximations across an extended budgetary horizon by setting funding goals for the next several years.
As an open letter from UCLA Academic Senate Chair Linda Sarna explained, “the resources required to teach an undergraduate major in mathematics differs from those required to teach an undergraduate in music or engineering.”
If a campus disproportionately employs highly paid faculty in a given discipline because there are more students in that field, the university is likely to have greater educational costs. This disparity is not accounted for in rebenching.
Under rebenching, funds will be awarded by first determining enrollment targets for each UC over the next six years. Projected enrollment is then multiplied by the funding weights to determine budget goals for every campus to which the reform applies.
Rebenching creates an inflexible funding environment that doesn’t allow each campus to adjust to its unique and ever-evolving budgetary needs. Like any funding reform, rebenching should be sensitive to yearly changes in educational expenses. Rather than giving the weights a lifetime that exceeds half a decade, they should be subject to annual or biyearly review.
The UC Office of the President arrived at these funding weights by testing different formulas and eventually settling on the current numbers, rather than adhering to any strict standards, according to UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein.
While it equalizes funding in theory, rebenching does little to account for living, breathing UC students.
Given that raw enrollment numbers fail to account for fine-tuned differences among students, the UC and its stakeholders would benefit from a more data-driven and scientific approach to funding.
Of course, such an approach is more labor-intensive than simply applying funding weights. For one, it would require new data collection and analysis projects to determine how much it costs to educate any given student. However, the outcome would accurately reflect the realities of California higher education.
Historically, campuses have been reticent to generate and publicize large quantities of data. Ray Franke, a University of Massachusetts professor of higher education who chaired the Student Fee Advisory Committee as a doctoral student at UCLA, said that campus data was often made available only to certain administrators.
Such reluctance towards mainstreaming campus data works against the interest of each campus and the system as a whole. The UC and its constituent universities should instead pursue an aggressive policy of data-based funding.
As each campus works on developing enrollment targets to implement the new reform, UC officials and campus administrators should brainstorm ways to ensure state funding matches the empirical reality at each university.
Equalizing revenue between campuses is a worthy goal and may be cause for significant reform. But implementing an overly simplistic funding model is a step backwards, replacing one type of inequality for another.