Tuesday, 4/15/97 Assembly seeks to ban new fee Bill would
prevent university from charging for technology
By Brooke Olson Daily Bruin Staff California legislators’ are
stepping in on students’ behalf, introducing legislation to curb
rising fees within public university’s. Assemblyman Ted Lempert (D
– Palo Alto), introduced a bill last month to prevent California’s
public colleges and universities from imposing any student fee for
accessing technology. If the bill is approved in the next few
months, UC students could avoid a potential fee increase over the
next few years. University administrators had planned to implement
a $40 mandatory Instructional Technology Fee for the 1997-98 school
year. The proposal, though, was bought out by the governor last
winter, thereby staving off the additional fee for the next school
year. But the 1998-99 school year is another matter. According to
UC officials, the university plans to include the technology fee on
its budget for the 1998-99 school year. "The fee will be on the
budget again but we’ll ask the governor to buy it out," said
university spokesperson Terry Colvin. "Hopefully, the money for the
technology fee will come from the state," but the buy-out is not
guaranteed, Colvin added. Assembly Bill 530 seeks to prevent the
university from ever implementing this or any other technology fee.
The fees are a counterproductive barrier in the pursuit of
education and have a negative effect on California’s role in the
global economy, Lempert said. "California competes with other
states and other nations in a global economy," Lempert said. "To
compete, our students must have easy access to all forms of
information technologies, including equipment, systems and
networks. "Imposing fees for using campus computers certainly
offers a barrier for many students," he added. But UC officials
contend that the fee is necessary to increase the amount of
software and hardware available to the students. This includes
providing greater access to the Internet, digitized local library
collections and instructional facilities to meed the needs of the
disabled "The reason for it is to develop a pool of money the
university can use to update its technology structure to help with
interwiring of campuses, connecting campuses to the internet and
other technology projects," Colvin said. Students and opponents of
the fee argue that use of technology qualifies as instruction.
Under the 1960 California Master Plan for Education, the
legislature noted that students would not be required to pay for
instruction. "Technology is instruction and by imposing this fee on
students, the administrators are in clear violation of the Master
Plan," said Greg Vaughn, director of internal university affairs at
UC student association. Assembly Bill 530 will be reviewed within
the next few weeks by the Assembly Higher Education Committee,
which is chaired by Lempert. However, because the State
Constitution allows the university to be governed internally, the
State Legislature is precluded from enacting laws directly
impacting the university. The bill, therefore, requests the UC
Regents to not impose technology fees upon the student body. But
bills are not the only way legislators can prevent the regents from
levying higher costs on students. The technology fee would be
included in the 1998-99 proposed budget for current UC operations
and must be approved by the California legislator. As raising or
implementing new fees on college students is an unpopular platform
for many legislators – especially Democrats – it is likely that the
proposed fee would not be approved, legislators said. Senate
President Pro Tem Bill Lockyer, D-Hayward, has repeatedly said he
will oppose any plan to raise fees. "The basic concern, first of
all, is that most of (the legislators) objected or didn’t like the
fee increases that were imposed year after year," Lockyer said.
"Although the fee hikes have froze over the last few years as the
legislature has put more and more money into the university, the
UC’s really need to reconsider their priorities and make sure that
higher education is both affordable and accessible," he added.
External Links:
California State Senate