Differential Tuition Pricing at UC: The Sky Would Fall Says the Contra Costa Times. But Would It?

The Contra Costa Times on 5/12/11 had an editorial indicating that differential tuition among the UC campuses would be a bad idea. Below is an excerpt:

FINANCIAL ADVERSITY can spawn positive innovation; it also can lead to huge mistakes. Establishing variable tuition at the University of California campuses would be the latter. Advocates of different tuition rates for each campus argue that it would allow individual campuses to raise more revenue during a time of tight state budgets and that consumer demand should play a bigger role in the cost of education. However, the likely result of variable tuition is higher costs at the top-rated campuses in the UC system, such as the ones at Berkeley and Los Angeles. Such elitism should not be brought to the University of California…

Full editorial is at http://www.contracostatimes.com/opinion/ci_18051009

Just for fun, I checked the print subscription rates of the Contra Costa Times and the San Fransisco Chronicle on their websites. The former was offering a 7-day subscription for $1.53/week. The latter would give me a Thursday-Sunday subscription for $4.20/week.

I also looked up tuition at the two UC Anderson management schools. Yes, there are two! One is at UCLA and the other is at UC-Riverside. (They are named after different Andersons.) The one at UCLA seems to charge something like $5,000 more than the one at UC-Riverside.

There must be a lesson here somewhere.