Tuition Hikes at the University of Compensation

University of California Regent Richard Blum confessed that he was "apoplectic" at the Board of Regents meeting Wednesday. The husband of Sen. Dianne Feinstein supports tuition increases as high as 28 percent over five years, which the board approved Thursday. Blum warned that private universities such as Yale and Stanford threaten to poach academic superstars. "In my investment business, if I underpaid my staff as much as the university is underpaid," said Blum, "I'd have nothing but empty desks." And: "You've got to get real about this stuff."

California Gov. Jerry Brown was ready to take up the challenge. Brown's vote on the board was against the tuition raises because they would violate a budget deal crafted in Sacramento that promised, in exchange for a tuition freeze, two annual 5 percent increases followed by two annual 4 percent increases to UC and California State University funding. "Richard," quoth Dao Guv, "I want to point out that you run an investment banking operation. This is a public university."

Also: "Money doesn't buy everything in the world. If it did, I wouldn't have anybody working for me."

And: "The university can also lead by the way it compensates people, by the cost structure it creates. It doesn't have to follow the Ivy Leagues."

Brown warned that another recession surely will occur, and when it does, Sacramento most likely will cut UC funding again. It's not hard to cut funds for a top-drawer institution of higher education when lawmakers also have to cut funding for public schools and health care. Brown's solution? Appoint a select committee to reduce UC's cost structure. Don't raise tuition while state funding is rising, because you'll have to raise tuition when state funds decline.

CNN ran a documentary Thursday, "Ivory Tower," about runaway tuition, which only reinforced my suspicion that tuition keeps rising because academics don't care about containing costs to make school more affordable for students. The regents fit that profile. At its most recent meeting, the board granted 20 percent raises to three chancellors who earn more than $300,000 apiece.

At the regents meeting, student activists chanted and protested. Some said the regents were "disingenuous." Elected regents, for the most part, voted against the tuition hikes, whereas most of the appointed regents voted for them. (I have to assume they were appointed with that very expectation, because they maneuver in worlds where huge pay is the norm, even for executives who no longer rate them.) The fee increases were guaranteed to pass the minute President Janet Napolitano proposed giving UC a raise.

At the hearing, many students complained they were being held hostage, but it's really taxpayers who have been bound and gagged. Napolitano argues that if Sacramento increases funding, then students won't have to pay higher tuition. Actually, some 55 percent of UC's students don't pay a dime of the $12,192 tuition, so it doesn't pinch their wallets if tuition rises. Only 31 percent of them pay full freight. Half of students graduate without owing student loans. Nonetheless, student activists dutifully demand that the Legislature pony up more dollars to spare them tuition hikes that largely would be passed on to taxpayers. (The state provides grants that pay all fees for students whose parents earn less than $101,000. A new program for "middle-class" families will provide smaller subsidies for families with incomes up to $175,000.)

In 2012, Brown persuaded voters to pass Proposition 30, which raised the state sales tax by 0.25 percent over four years and top-tier income taxes for seven years. A big selling point to student voters was the promise that the tax increases would prevent looming tuition hikes. At the time, UC solons did not proclaim that they would take the budget deal and Prop 30 money -- and still raise tuition.

Two years later, the regents are demanding more than the extra $100 million that Sacramento pledged in exchange for a tuition freeze. Just two years into the four-year deal, the regents broke faith by voting to raise tuition. There's only one way for Brown and the Legislature to address this money grab: Pull the remaining increase in UC's allowance. Don't give in to greedy academics.

“At its most recent meeting, the board granted 20 percent raises to three chancellors who earn more than $300,000 apiece.”

And there is part of the problem, not just at the college level but at the k-12 level too. Hire more and more administrators, more educrats, with good salaries and big annual raises. Hire just enough teachers and professor to get by.

Blum warned that private universities such as Yale and Stanford threaten to poach academic superstars.

I believe, as a rule, these "academic superstars" are researchers and only secondarily teachers. Yes, it is nice that a university or college has a Nobel Laureate (one is available in 2017), but having such by itself does not raise the academic ability of the students! Remember the students, those walking piles of student loan debt? Year after tiresome year, the tuition increases have far outstripped inflation, yet in that same time frame, almost every measure shows American Students falling behind their foreign counterparts. Value for money paid appears to be absent from this equation.

Big Education cycle:

1)make unlimited taxpayer subsidized loans to students
2)charge them outrageous tuition
3)pay ginormous salaries to ~~profs and~~ admins
4)profs and admins donate to Democrats

It works well...for them....

There, fixed that.

The money from tuition increases goes almost entirely into administration, "ginormous salaries" as you said, and increasing the numbers of Associate, Assistant and Vice Chancellors, Presidents, Provosts and Deans and secretarial staff for the same. In the 23 years I've been at the university where I am currently employed, the number of administrators and support staff has increased by 50%, top administrators have given themselves raises on the order of 8% per year, while faculty remaining within the same rank have had their purchasing power eroded by inflation (and no, our promotion raised were not princely), and the number of faculty shank by .4%. This is typical, as is the shift from full-time faculty to adjuncts paid by the course (a trend my university has thus far bucked), while administrators continue getting fat raises and even corporate-style bonuses (yes, bonuses to administrators at public universities).

There is a book by a professor from Johns Hopkins entitled The Fall of the Faculty: the Rise of the All-Administrative University that documents the trend.

It's all part of the Era of Bad Stewards: fiduciaries (in this case university administrators) acting as if their positions exist for their own enrichment, rather than those they are supposed to be serving (in this case the faculty) -- yes, the faculty, the university as part of the patrimony of Western Civilization the left has been trashing is defined by its faculty, not the students who pass through it. And yes, easy credit created at government behest plays the same role in the feathering of the nests of various and assorted university administrators that it plain in fat bonuses for Countrywide and Goldman Sachs executives.

You seem to think a university is the same thing as a college. By definition the faculty at a university must be first and foremost scholars (in the sciences we now call this "researchers") in their disciplines (or practicing artists in the case of the arts), not merely teachers of their discipline. Since the Middle Ages when the university became one of the great institutions of Western Civilization, that was the point of studying at university -- to study with people who actually defined the discipline, not mere copyists.

American students are falling behind their foreign counterparts not because of any failing in our universities (or colleges), save one, which is quite specific and concentrated, but because by the time they reach university, most American students have been ruined by American K-12 education.

The main contribution to American students' failings found at universities is the role of colleges of education is the destruction of American K-12 education -- by offering majors with less academic rigor than a major in art history, they funnel slackers into careers as school teachers, equipping them not with anything actually contributing to sound pedagogy, but with all the baleful educational theories emanating from the left (look-say as a substitute for phonics, Vygotskian "social construction of knowledge" claptrap, and whateve the latest way to miseducate children in mathematics is -- they keep changing -- and the like). And this could be fixed by the legislatures of the several states with "right to teach laws" that abolish the monopoly given colleges of education on producing certified teachers (or qualified teachers, or whatever the local term is).

Actually, the fact that those of us on the faculty of American universities are able to turn out as many American engineers and scientists starting with the raw-material the K-12 schools give us is a testimony to the quality of American universities.

Actually, some 55 percent of UC's students don't pay a dime of the $12,192 tuition, so it doesn't pinch their wallets if tuition rises.

My daughters went through the UC system. Tuition was hiked every year they went there until graduation. Which pissed me off because they were allowing illegals to get in-state tuition, which was then subsidized or waived. Kids of color (excluding Asians because they're considered majority) often get in free. If they would equally charge all students, they would not need to raise tuition on the whites and asians to cover latinos and blacks. My daughters graduated within four years, while latinos and blacks party and stick around many years beyond that because they're not paying.

Well put, but perhaps I am not the only one in confusion as your definition would have the 10 campuses in this, the University of California system, all being researcher quality. Since this is a system that has been designated by law to admit the top 12.5% of California's high school graduates, it would appear to me that they are expected to be teachers first and researchers second.

Undeniably there are MANY faculty members who ARE SCHOLARS in this institution. Equally undeniable is that you are elucidating the proper terminology used in the past. After all, if you read of the occupational schools they are almost always colleges if they use that term. However, like the infamous grade inflation, some are colleges that call themselves universities and few are universities that call themselves colleges (Hillsdale?)

On a side note however, you have universities and then within them you have colleges. Grant you that has an ancient tradition - Oxford & Cambridge to name the most prominent in the Anglo-World, but does the researcher/scholar work for the university or is he at the college? (wry grin!)

...my suspicion that tuition keeps rising because academics don't care about containing costs to make school more affordable for students

Not exactly. It's because the priorities for administrators are (1) increasing their own salaries, (2) increasing their own retirement pay, (3) expanding the number of their subordinates to justify items #1 and #2, (4) catering to the official Priviliged Whining Minority Groups.

One of these days someone is going to invent a way to videotape lectures by top educators, and then distribute these taped lectures via some form of easily accessed mass media, instead of paying swarms of Lefty proselytizers tax money to re-invent the wheel in classrooms across the country on a daily basis.

It's too bad we still don't have the technology to do stuff like that...

LOL! :)

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.