 Color him sticker-shocked. “I
look at my first-year tuition, and I’m surprised at how much
it’s gone up,” says Rigo Marquez, vice president of
external affairs for Associated Students (AS).
Since 2002, UCSD resident undergraduate fees have jumped from $3,384
to $6,230. Add in room and board, books, transportation and incidentals
and you are looking at $19,675 a year. By living at home, students
can shave $5,000 off the tab. But commuting is not an option for
Marquez, whose family lives in Los Angeles. “I’m on my
own at UCSD. I get no financial assistance from my parents,” says
Marquez, a senior who is a first-generation college student—and
the first member of his immigrant family to earn a high school diploma.
Marquez transferred here three years ago from Santa Monica College.
As a community college student, he managed to hold down a full-time
position. As a UCSD student last year, he worked three jobs to
cover his food and rent. “I went from making $20,000 a year
to making $400 a month,” says Marquez. When he graduates
this May, he’ll
owe about$20,000 in Stafford loans.
“The
University of California system is very elitist, because it’s
telling me you need to come from a background where your parents
can support you,” he says. “It’s starting to
be more like a private-school education.”
 Marquez’s financial plight is not unique. This year, cash-strapped
California faced a $15 billion budget shortfall and the prolonged
fiscal crisis is threatening educational opportunity throughout
the state. It is part of a long-term pattern. Currently the UC
system receives 3.5 percent of the state general funds—compared
with 7 percent in 1970—but even in the flush Clinton years,
state education subsidies were drying up.
“California no longer has the ability to
subsidize a low-cost education. Individuals will be paying more
and more for their public education,” says
Vincent De Anda, UCSD director of student financial services.
The unintended consequence, worries Marquez, is a homogeneous public
university that does not look like California. “How will
the UC system be accessible to low income students like my friends
and myself?” he wonders. “It’s a sacrifice for
us to get here, and it’s an even bigger challenge to stay
here. Students of color are already among the hardest hit.”
Compared with other academic institutions, UC’s support of
needy students has been stellar. The UC system currently enrolls
nearly 50,000 students who receive Pell grants, with recipients
typically coming from families earning less than $35,000 a year.
Policy analyst Tom Mortenson recently
surveyed access to higher education at the top 150 public and private
universities ranked by U.S. News and World Report. UC undergraduate
campuses garnered the top six positions
for enrollment of low-income students. UCSD, with 28.3 percent
of its students qualifying for Pell grants, ranked
fifth on the list.
Despite
the recent increases, the current fee for UC resident undergraduates
is about $1,200 less than the average tuition at the four other
public universities UC regularly uses for fee-comparison purposes:
University of Illinois, University of Virginia, University of Michigan
and State University of New York (SUNY). Factor in the cost of living,
and UC is slightly more expensive than the others.
However,
the bottom line is that the financial squeeze is being felt across
the nation. “Governors all over the country are struggling
with higher-education funding,” says Jerry Kissler, UC’s
assistant vice president for budget planning. “On the one
hand, a college education is a lifestyle issue—and it’s
more important than it was 40 or 50 years ago. On the other hand,
a larger portion of the state budget is needed for aging baby boomers.”
***
It could have been worse for California. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
2004-05 budget contained a few eleventh-hour reprieves. Outreach
programs that help high school students get into UC and succeed
there mainly escaped the ax. Although fees were increased by 14
percent, budget cutters served up enough Cal Grant financial aid
to cover the 32,000 needy UC students. And 5,800 UC-qualified freshmen
learned—somewhat belatedly—that they need not cool
their heels at a community college for the next two years and they
could enter UC posthaste.
A six-year compact between the governor, UC and California State
University laid out maximum fee hikes and minimum funding levels
through 2010-11. Among the wait-till-next-academic-year carrots:
a return to cost-of-living raises for faculty and staff after three
flat years, and a 2.5 percent increase in student enrollments for
2005-06.
“It appears we are at last turning a corner,” said
UC President Robert C. Dynes, once the budget ink was dry. But
UC did not exactly
heave a collective “whew.” Some skeptics questioned
the ink itself: whether it was permanent or disappearing.
“A higher-education compact is for planning purposes—to give UC some
kind of assurance,” says Anthony Simbol, principal fiscal and policy analyst
for the nonpartisan Legislative Analysts’ Office (LAO) in Sacramento. “The
Legislature is not bound to approve the agreement—and there is no certainty
the funding will be there.”
When California’s economy goes south, compacts typically get underfunded.
During the final years of the Governor Davis administration, for instance,
the state could not find the money to honor the compact.
The present multiyear agreement is on similarly shaky ground. “The governor’s
budget relies on the economy turning around. If that doesn’t happen,
all bets are off,” says UCSD’s De Anda.
The multiyear agreement calls for 8 percent fee hikes for the
next two years and a 10 percent cap on increases after that—even
if fiscal woes drag on. The pact earmarks between 20 and 33 percent
of any annual fee increases
for financial aid. The compact, assuming it is fully funded, buys time for
California to gear up for Tidal Wave II: the demographic avalanche of baby
boomers’ kids who will reach college age by 2010.
To third-year student and AS commissioner for diversity Christopher
Sweeten, the pact is disastrous. “It may relieve fiscal problems for a little
while,” he says. “Long term, though, you can’t keep raising
fees on students who don’t have money in the first place. Students are
the ones who, after they graduate, bring fiscal health to the economy.”
***
Since 1960, the California Master Plan for Higher Education has
emphasized access, quality and affordability. For the better
part of three decades, it promised tuition-free education at
UC to any state resident in the top 12.5 percent of the statewide
high school graduating class. And even though fees for UC resident
undergraduates jumped 157 percent from 1989 to 1995, the spirit—if
not the letter—of the plan remained intact. Any fee rise
was accompanied by substantial gains in student financial aid.
The allocation of the equivalent 33 percent of undergraduate
fee increases for financial aid persisted, seemingly impervious
to boom-and-bust cycles.
Until now. This year’s decline in return-to-aid ratio from
33 to 20 percent was a historic first. The seemingly inviolable
practice of taking one-third of every fee increase and earmarking
it for financial aid was violated.
“It’s a major setback for California,
and for the University,” says
Joseph Watson, UCSD vice chancellor for student affairs. “The
weakening of financial aid won’t have an immediate impact
on our enrollment numbers, but it will have an impact on how
students spend their time. There will be a degradation in the
quality of
the undergraduate experience,” he warned.
 When Jennifer Pae was a freshman, her financial aid package consisted
of loans, scholarships and grants. Today, laments the AS president, “an
aid package is purely loans. If this budget had been in place four
years ago, I would have found it difficult to come here. I would
have carefully considered my options, to see if I could get a better
deal with more financial support at a private university.”
Pae, a first-generation college student, does not receive financial
help from her family. She is supplementing her $100 AS weekly stipend
and $5,500 Cal Grant with private loans and she knows it is not
just the fee increases that put a squeeze on needy students. “UC
schools are located in some of the most expensive areas in the
state,” Pae points out. A single room in the La Jolla area,
including utilities, rents for $500 to $900.
Financial
concerns are rampant, not just among poorer families but also the
middle class. “College-bound high school students are more
panicky than ever before and parents are more aware of the sense
of urgency,” says financial planner Deborah Fox, of Fox College
Funding in San Diego. She is seeing a greater willingness to opt
for two years at a community college as a cost-saving measure. Her
unwavering advice is: “Don’t wait till your senior year
in high school to begin the planning process.”
Christopher Anoc, a third-year student, receives some tuition help
from his family. His mother is a nurse, his father is a chemist,
and his younger brother attends a pricey private school. As a freshman,
Anoc qualified for a $3,000 grant. In year two, his aid package
included a $2,500 grant and $1,000 in work-study money. This year,
the grant is $180. Anoc, an engineering student, plans to make
up the difference by working 20 or more hours a week at an off-campus
job. “My schedule will be a lot more hectic and accessibility
to campus will be difficult, since I don’t drive to school,” he
says.
This is precisely the sort of situation that worries Watson. “We
want our students to engage in academic programs and opportunities
that make them highly competitive candidates for admission to selective
graduate and professional schools,” he explains. “That
requires time and energy devoted to coursework and enrichment activities,
such as undergraduate research.”
In addition to threatening academic aid for students, the shrinking
budget is causing conflicts between the undergraduate and graduate
sides of the house. This academic year, for instance, to help some
graduate departments retain their teaching and research assistants,
UC breached the traditional firewall between graduate and undergraduate
financial aid. “A portion of the funds to pay graduate assistants
is coming out of what would have been used to fund undergraduate
grants,” says De Anda, UCSD’s director of student financial
services.
Typically, graduate financial aid is merit-based, while undergraduate
financial aid is needs-based. Calling the shattered firewall “a
big mistake,” Watson notes: “Undergraduate financial
aid is designed to benefit the people of California and not the
University per se. You cannot place an insurmountable financial
burden on the neediest families.”
***
As a public university and prominent research institution, UCSD
walks a financial tightrope between equity and excellence. Equity
amounts to affordability and guaranteed access for academically
qualified low- and middle-income students. Excellence, however,
precludes a low-cost education product. The University regularly
competes with private schools for faculty, students and research
money.
“The gap between private and public universities is getting larger,” says
Kissler, UC’s assistant vice president for budget planning. “Private
schools have been picking up talent from public schools—and
raising their tuition faster than public schools could.”
In response to dwindling state funds, UCLA Chancellor Albert Carnesale
is floating a trial balloon that would dramatically increase both
tuition and available financial aid at a few of UC’s more
prestigious campuses. It is a solution that could have merit, reckons
UCSD economics professor Julian Betts, provided you use well over
50 percent of the fee hikes to aggressively expand needs-based
scholarships. “It’s price discrimination, it’s
what private corporations do, and it could work for education,” he
suggests. “You segment the market and charge different prices
to different people.”
Another approach might be to penalize students who take too many
years to graduate and thus help speed up the pipeline. Betts rejects
this sausage-factory-style argument. “Universities give people
a chance to experiment and see where their interests and innate
abilities truly lie,” he says. “There’s something
to be said for spending a couple of quarters shopping around.”
Pushing a four-years-and-out regimen would hurt some disadvantaged
students, thinks graduating senior Perse Hooper, who works at the
Office of Academic Support & Instructional Services (OASIS),
a campus-tutoring program. “UCSD is a hard school, and so
different from high school. If it takes a student more than four
years to be academically successful, that should be okay,” she
says.
Hooper, a single mother and Native American, is the first member
of her family to attend a four-year college. She finds that some
students benefit by taking three courses rather than the typically
recommended four in their first academic quarter. “If you
overload students and they have a bad academic start, it affects
retention,” she warns.
Meanwhile, the need for private aid is greater than ever. For the
past decade, the UCSD Alumni Association has awarded four-year
merit scholarships to top-achieving high school students. This
year, the Association added a needs-based Alumni Leadership Scholarship
program for upper-division undergraduate UCSD students. The new
two-year, $2,000-a-year scholarship is roughly the equivalent of
200 hours of work-study. “We will continue to award merit
scholarships, but we also want to help students who are already
here and alleviate some of their financial burden,” says
Alumni Association executive director John Valva.
Applicants must have at least a 3.0 GPA to qualify for the Alumni
Leadership Scholarship. “We want to award students who have
financial need and are the superstars on this campus,” explains
Valva. “They deserve that additional support so they can
continue to perform those leadership roles.”
Compared with Berkeley and UCLA, UCSD is at a disadvantage in recruiting
top-drawer students. “We cannot fund them at the same level
as those older campuses,” says Valva.
Meanwhile. In 2003, the income gap between college and non-college
graduates was 62 percent, according to The College Board and it
continues its relentless climb. If the doors of opportunity slam
shut, education will not be the only resource at risk. The California
dream of affordable education for all qualified residents was not
just a dream: It was a promise. Former UC President Clark Kerr
warned of the dangers of defaulting on that promise in his 1999
testimony before the Joint Committee to Develop a Master Plan for
Education. “I think it’s a suicidal route for the State
of California, and also for the United States, if we keep on losing
ground,” he warned. “As goes education, so goes California.”
Sylvia Tiersten is a freelance writer based in San Diego. |
