Regents approve professional school fee hike
By Phillip Carter
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
Despite its billing as the affirmative action "showdown," last
month’s University of California Regents’ meeting at UCLA dealt
more with budgets and numbers than diversity and
multiculturalism.
As a protest about affirmative action ensued outside the James
West Alumni Center, the regents approved a progressive fee increase
for UC professional schools, pushing up the cost of attendance by
$2,000 for law and business schools and $1,000 for other
professional schools.
Under the plan, medical students will pay $6,376 in additional
fees in 1999, when the raises stop.
One regent said he supported the fee increase because these
students receive more in return for their professional degree
 and should pay for that.
"I support differential fees for professional schools out of
fairness  all their instruction is subsidized by taxpayers,"
said Regent John Davies. "It’s fair to have students shoulder a
bigger proportion of the burden."
Aside from fairness, Chancellor Charles Young said he supported
higher professional school fees because they would allow the UC
system to make its professional schools better with the shrinking
amounts of state money available.
The higher fees are necessary, he said, "in order to maintain
and improve the quality of the schools involved  this is a
way of providing more financial support for these schools."
But, he added that these schools would actually be more
affordable because of the UC’s "return to aid" policy. One third of
the professional school fees are distributed as financial aid to
students in that individual school.
One group of students agreed with this particular tenet of the
increase, saying that if fees had to go up, the money should stay
in those schools which paid higher fees.
"The schools that pay the fees should be the ones who get the
benefits of them, and these fees should not go to subsidize base
budget allocations" said John Carmichael, president of the Anderson
Graduate School of Management’s student association. Carmichael
spoke on behalf of the students of all five UC business schools,
who voted to endorse the fee increase.
Despite the business students’ support, the majority of students
who spoke at the regents’ meeting disagreed with the fee increase,
and said it would unfairly tax graduate students pursuing a
professional degree.
Among these students was graduate External Vice President Kevin
Welner, who said these fee increases went against the UC philosophy
of open access, and could result in students not being able to
afford an advanced degree in the UC system.
Regents Glenn Campbell, Gray Davis, Tirso Del Junco, Velma
Montoya and Tom Sayles voted against the fee increase at the
meeting, citing the unfairness of a fee increase which is
distributed unequally among UC students.
In an earlier interview, Del Junco said this fee increase
symbolized a misguided UC philosophy of subsidizing its budget with
students’ money, instead of state funds.
"You cannot balance the UC budget on the backs of students," he
said.
Although affirmative action dominated headlines before the
meeting, there was little discussion of the issue by the regents.
Several attendees speculated this was because Regent Ward Connerly,
who first raised the issue at the January meeting, was absent due
to a friend’s illness.