California’s U.S. Senate candidates Kamala Harris and Loretta Sanchez have spoken out in favor of college affordability, but neither of the candidates’ plans are specific or even convincing enough to tackle the issues of growing student debt, compromised education quality and overworked faculty, especially at public universities like UCLA.
Harris and Sanchez must offer more detailed solutions – solutions that actually reflect California’s educational funding situation – to the budgetary issues the higher education community faces. Otherwise, their plans amount to nothing more than empty rhetoric.
Their promises of college affordability are even more critical because the University of California has suffered, and has yet to fully recover, from precipitous budget cuts over the past decade – lending far less aid to colleges and universities to subsidize tuition. Consequently, the onus to pay has shifted from the state to individual students.
According to the UC’s budget proposal, the state now spends about 30 percent less per UC student compared to the amount it spent in 2005-2006 academic year. Even with the state allocating more money to the UC, there’s still a lot of ground to make up. Our next senator’s ideas should attempt to address the long-term structural funding problems behind the funding crisis.
To their credit, the candidates have at least acknowledged the financial issues surrounding higher education, and Harris has put forth a plan. She affirms that student debt is at a historic high, which may discourage students from pursuing a college education. To address this crisis, Harris offers a three-pronged approach, which includes holding student loan servicers accountable, making community colleges free and public universities cheaper, and rewarding federal grants to higher education institutions.
But while these are certainly noble goals, the language of Harris’s plan betrays her. With promises to “support policies,” “create incentives,” “lead the fight,” and “bring the educational community together,” it’s apparent that Harris has few clear or ready solutions beyond trying to increasing state funding and federal support programs. Although federal grants may indeed aid California’s ailing educational funding system, the UC has an education budget of over $6.6 billion – it is unlikely that federal grants will make that much of a difference.
Sanchez does not even pretend to have anything other than traditional solutions. Instead, she draws on her past support for Head Start and Pell Grant programs. And while Sanchez also acknowledges the student debt crisis, voters are offered no assurance other than that Sanchez will “continue to fight to close the achievement gap.”
Both Sanchez and Harris are banking on the increase in state funding supposedly making up the decrease in tuition, but the promise of a free or dramatically lower tuition is idealistic at best. Even with the increase in state funding, UCLA itself has seen an increase in undergraduates in recent years and a possible compromise in education quality by the higher student-teacher ratio and increasing number of discussion sections.
To lessen the tuition – and ultimately lessen the associated student loans – would take a miraculous discovery of state funds or a drastic decrease in education quality at the UC.
As students, we want to believe that free or lower tuition is possible in our lifetimes. But in the midst of this student debt crisis, students need pragmatism, not wishful thinking.