Students at the University of California will be even more
hard-pressed to pay for their education next year than they have
been in the past.
By a 12 to 1 vote, the UC Board of Regents approved the
2005-2006 budget, which includes an 8 percent increase in
undergraduate fees and a 10 percent increase in graduate fees. This
would increase the resident undergraduate fee to $6,312 on average
per year and resident graduate fees to $7,928.
The income from student fees allocated to financial aid has also
been a topic of concern. Students have lobbied the regents to
increase the amount to 33 percent, rather than the 25 percent they
have decided on.
The fee increases were expected due to the compact the
university made with the governor in May, but specific amount the
regents would allocate to aid was then unknown.
Only Student Regent Jodi Anderson voted against approving the
budget.
“I wanted to see an amendment to embrace a 33 percent
return-to-aid,” she said after the meeting. “When you
look at the overall budget … I think it’s
doable.”
The difference between the 25 percent return-to-aid in the
current budget and the 33 percent that Anderson and other students
have requested would cost the university $6 million.
This figure may seem significant to the average student, but as
Regent Norman Pattiz pointed out, in a budget of $4.4 billion, this
is a small amount.
The size of the difference, small in comparison to the overall
budget, surprised Pattiz at the meeting.
“So all this is about 6 million bucks? Six million
dollars?” he asked his fellow regents. “There
isn’t any place within the University of California system
where we can find $6 million?”
But in the end, Pattiz, the only regent other than Anderson who
voiced concern about the return-to-aid amount during the meeting,
voted to approve the budget.
“We can’t hold the budget back based on one
issue,” Pattiz said. “We really had no
option.”
While $6 million may be miniscule in comparison to the overall
budget, in these difficult times, regents say every bit
matters.
“We’ve got a very, very tight budget. We don’t
have any money just floating around,” Pattiz said.
Regent Richard Blum laid out the university’s losses.
“Over the past couple of years, $500 million have been
taken out of the budget,” he said before the meeting.
“These are very bad times.”
In these tough times, many in UC leadership believe that student
fees must be increased.
One concern regents repeatedly mentioned is the quality of
education students receive at UC schools. Many say additional
funding, in part by student fees, is vital.
“In light of our desire to maintain the quality of the
education … we need to be able to move forward and so I think the
student ““ I think everyone ““ needs to share in
that,” said Regent Gerald Parsky.
But some students think accessibility, not quality, should be in
the forefront of regents’ minds.
“They’re not acknowledging the students and
they’re not acknowledging the issues that affect the
students. They’re acknowledging the issues that affect the
university,” said Bill Shiebler, a member of UC Student
Association and a student at UC Santa Barbara.
Students were vehement in their opposition to the budget, but UC
President Robert Dynes presented it from a more forgiving
angle.
“For the lowest-income students, student aid structure is
such that those students will be supported, they will not see the
fee increases,” he said.
Another point of disagreement is the value of the compact with
the governor ““ some object because they believe it
unnecessarily raises fees, but others emphasize its value.
“I think that the compact that’s been entered into
was very important and a very positive development for the
university, primarily because it establishes a framework for
predictability,” Parsky said.
The compact with the governor lays out a plan for the future, so
students can be aware of the fate of fees ““ and they can be
sure that fees are likely to go up before they go down.