If there’s one thing students should take away from the budget woes impacting UCLA, it’s that we all need to be very careful about planning to meet our General Education and major requirements in time to graduate.
The Bruin ran a news story on Thursday (“Low budget may force class cuts,” Oct. 2) outlining some of the fiscal challenges the university is facing and how they will negatively impact available classes at UCLA.
It turns out that departments now have to absorb additional costs that were formerly covered under the chancellor’s budget, such as employee benefits and utilities.
Now that departments have to cover these extra costs and aren’t getting any additional money to do so, they have to reduce their expenses in other areas.
Unfortunately, those “other areas” are classes and sections taught by teaching assistants and non-tenured faculty, such as lecturers.
And again, unfortunately, many of those classes taught by TAs and lecturers are the basic writing and language classes most students need to graduate.
The result is that students like us have fewer classes to enroll in ““ especially GE classes, but also upper- and lower-division classes required for our majors.
It can already be a maddening experience enrolling in classes, and this year it will be worse for almost everyone.
Regardless of the underlying cause of our budget difficulty, it spells one clear thing for students: if you don’t do everything from Day 1 to make sure you’re on track to meet your requirements, you could be out of luck down the line.
But it’s also beneficial to examine some of the underlying causes behind UCLA’s budget problem. There are a lot of people who are responsible for dictating the budgets at both the UC level and at UCLA specifically ““ unfortunately, neither of those people are the UC President or the UCLA Chancellor.
Simply put, their hands are tied. Our budget is tied to the state budget, which depends on the economy and the whims of the legislature and the governor.
California is having bad year after bad year when it comes to the budget. The legislature refuses to bend and cut programs, and the governor refuses to raise taxes. Now we’re taking billions from the federal government.
Students, staff, unions, faculty and the other constituents of this university need to stop blaming the wrong people for our financial situation and start asking the university what we can do here and now to make the situation better.
Though the chancellor’s hands are tied in determining the amount of money we receive from the state, they are not tied in other areas.
For example, UCLA is over-enrolled by about 1,250 students ““ meaning that UCLA does not receive state support for those students. Administrators could make a very hard decision and reduce university enrollment targets for the coming years to compensate for this increase.
The UC Board of Regents could also raise our fees, which could actually help the situation, except then we would all be getting less education for even more money ““ a prospect this board would not appreciate.
Whether we like it or not, this crisis means that all of us are getting a little bit less for what we pay a considerable amount of money for. With more students and fewer classes to go around, something is clearly going to have to be done soon before we lose what makes us great: the quality of our education.