Report: Affordable Public Higher Education is Possible Today

A report this week from Reclaim California Higher Education (a coalition of faculty and student groups) makes the case that affordable (even free) higher education is within reach for California.

The privatization experiment has failed. The harm to a generation of hard-working, high-aiming young people is proven. It’s time to return to what works: the proven Master Plan for higher education in California. California, with its own resources, can afford to restore top-quality, accessible, affordable college and university opportunity to every qualified student. In fact, Californians can afford nothing less.

You can read a summary and download the entire report at the Reclaim website.

Tradition!

The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has issued a report on UC and CSU funding. LAO is usually viewed as a neutral agency. But it is a component of the legislature. So it tends to favor approaches that add to legislative control as opposed to, say, gubernatorial control. This report is no exception.

LAO seems to want to return to what it terms the “traditional” approach to funding, but with bells and whistles added to monitor legislative goals. The traditional approach seems to be one focused on undergraduate enrollment. But in fact the tradition – such as it is – has been to forget about tradition and cut the budget during state budget crises, in the knowledge that UC and CSU can raise tuition. Indeed, as the chart above indicates, these traditional deviations from tradition dominate tuition decisions.

The LAO is uncomfortable with the habit of the governor of just proposing dollar increases not linked to enrollment and then extracting some promises from the university to do this or that, e.g., to spend $10 million on online education.

It might be noted that since LAO chose to lump UC and CSU together, it might have discussed a sore point namely the fact that CSU, as a part of CalPERS, gets its pension costs taken care of by the state whereas the state likes to stand aloof from the UC pension and its costs.

You can read the report at http://lao.ca.gov/reports/2014/education/higher-ed-budgetary-practices/budgetary-practices-021114.pdf

In any case, there is much nostalgia for tradition, albeit with some uncertainty as to what that is. Sounds familiar!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRdfX7ut8gw?feature=player_detailpage]

Contemplating Tuition, Motherhood, and Apple Pie

Tuition is being studied up in Oakland by the UC prez, according to yesterday’s Daily Bruin:

…“I want tuition to be as low as possible, and I want it to be as predictable as possible,” Napolitano said at a UC Board of Regents meeting in November.

In a recent Google Hangout with students from various UC campuses, students asked Napolitano to talk about her current work in reforming the UC’s tuition policy. They also asked Napolitano how she plans to include student ideas in the reorganization of the tuition plan. Napolitano did not specify how student input would be considered, but maintained that it was important to the eventual decision.

(UC spokesperson Debra Klein said that) “The president believes strongly that, especially at a public university, tuition must be affordable for all students and their families.” …

Full story at http://dailybruin.com/2014/02/06/napolitano-works-on-revising-uc-tuition-policy/

The problem is simple to state. Within the state budget, the UC budget is the least protected. You can’t cut debt service. K-14 schools are insulated by Prop 98. The prisons are under quasi-federal jurisdiction due to overcrowding. Various social welfare programs are either somewhat constrained by federal rules or the legislature just doesn’t like to cut them. And the legislature knows that UC (and CSU) can pull the tuition lever. Legislators don’t have to touch the lever and can then blame the Regents. All the budget projections you see are based on having no economic downturn into the indefinite future. But someday there will be another. And, as numerous observers have pointed out, the state’s tax receipts are especially vulnerable due to heavy reliance on the progressive income tax and its dependence on the ups and downs of the incomes and capital gains of the top taxpayers.

This pie is pretty much baked.

Something to Think About While Waiting for the Governor and Regents

Snow at UCLA in 1932

The governor is due to give his State of the State address today. What, if anything, he will say that might have a connection to UC and higher ed is unknown. The Regents are also meeting today (and tomorrow).

Inside Higher Ed today is running a list of average annual snowfalls (in inches) at selected universities. So whatever happens at the State of the State or the Regents meeting (or if you have followed weather reports for other parts of the country today), remember that things could be worse:

1. Michigan Technological University: 200
2. Syracuse University and SUNY Oswego: 124
3. University of Rochester: 99
4. State University of New York at Buffalo: 94
5. University of Minnesota at Duluth: 86
6. University of Vermont: 81
7. Southern New Hampshire University: 69
8. Western Michigan University: 67
9. Cornell University: 65
10. University of Alaska at Fairbanks: 62

Full story at http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/01/22/10-snowiest-college-campuses-sort

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RWTQqpYBHQ8?feature=player_detailpage]

UPDATE: Yours truly was able to hear most of the governor’s speech. Why “most of”? Because the calchannel system evidently was overwhelmed by folks tuning in on the web. So, again, a cautionary note on the technology solutions to higher ed costs is warranted. The speech did mention UC in connection with research. Other than that reference, however, the governor focused on fiscal prudence, debt, drought, K-12 funding changes that divert resources to disadvantaged students, “subsidiarity” (mainly local assumption of prisoners), environment and greenhouse gas, and poverty.

At the same time the governor was speaking, the UC Regents web broadcast also had problems. Parts of the public comment session I heard involved fossil fuel divestment, complaints about anti-Israel lectures and course credit for such lectures, and sexual assaults at Berkeley. I heard part of UC president Napolitano’s report. Among the topics: cap on UCOP staff, consultants, travel. There was a reference to development of a new funding model for tuition to be unveiled in the spring and “efficiency” initiatives. Academic Senate chair William Jacobs spoke mainly on UC undergraduate programs.

The Committee on Finance heard a report on federal budget issues, particularly the squeeze on research funding. Federal funds also flow to UC through student aid, Medicare at the hospitals, etc. The latest budget deal in Washington was seen as a positive. As far as the state budget proposal of the governor is concerned, UCOP noted (as it has before) the CSU’s pension is taken car of by the state via CalPERS but not UC’s. It was noted that the governor now lists the UC pension as part of state debt and the Legislative Analyst is moving toward that position. Since the Leg Analyst is projecting more dollars than the governor, perhaps – at the time of the May revise – UC might get more funding and put some of it in the pension fund. The tuition freeze was noted as well as lack of an explicit enrollment growth factor in the governor’s budget.

The Committee on Health Services looked at a UCLA health take-over of a program previously run by USC. It’s not on the agenda documents, as far as I can tell – at least as of today. There is also a proposal for a joint lab in China that would conduct clinical trials. Significant skepticism was expressed by regents about the risks entailed and having UCLA’s name linked to an outside entity – a private firm. [Only one regent seemed to want to ask whether clinical trials in China are subject to the same kinds of controls, regulations, and human rights protections, that exist in the US. UCLA says it will apply US standards.]

A review of the nuclear labs followed. It was reported that past-due pension contributions for the labs had been partly paid and that the rest is expected due to the Washington budget deal.

Note: There is a notice on the governor’s website that he will attend the afternoon session of the Regents meeting. http://www.gov.ca.gov/news.php?id=18374

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Yours truly is teaching this quarter and his ability to record and post audio of Regents meetings is limited by other commitments. Nonetheless, it will (eventually) be done because the Regents continue their policy of archiving meetings only for 1 year. Presumably, calchannel will have a link to a recording of the governor’s speech so you should have access to that event soon.

What a DC Fly on the Wall Probably Didn’t Hear

UC prez Napolitano attended her former boss’s conference on higher ed in DC last week. From the LA Times:

Obama encourages economic diversity in higher education:

The president and first lady are joined at a White House summit by others who have made commitments to help increase college accessibility for low-income students. California schools are well represented.

More than 100 colleges and universities, including several in California, promised Thursday to try to attract more low-income students by strengthening relationships with high schools and community colleges, increasing access to advisors and offering more remedial programs…

Each of the nine University of California undergraduate campuses will expand outreach to low-income high school and community college students and increased financial and academic support, according to officials…

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-obama-college-20140117,0,5349627.story

What a fly on the wall at the event probably didn’t hear was discussion of the fact that the big jump in tuition at UC and other public universities was the result of the Great Recession and the sluggish economic recovery thereafter. State funding – not just in California – was cut back for public higher ed as tax revenues declined. There likely was little discussion of effective steps at the federal level to prevent a recurrence. So while more efficiencies in delivery of higher ed are always of interest, big negative macro shocks to the economy are much more a factor in threats to access. It’s a question of orders of magnitude.

Of course, yours truly wasn’t actually there, but it would have been interesting to hear:

Q&A

The Contra Costa Times ran an interview with UC president Napolitano that was published yesterday. But apparently the interview occurred in late 2013. Here are the questions:

Q: One of your first proposals was to make tuition rates more predictable. What might that look like?

Q: At the last UC regents meeting, Gov. Jerry Brown said UC had slim chances of securing additional state funding, with all of the competing needs in Sacramento. What did you make of that?

Q: Were you surprised by the low graduation rates for some student-athletes at Cal? (UC Berkeley’s football team had the lowest graduation rate of any major program in the NCAA.)

Q: One of your initiatives is to make it simpler for community college students to transfer to UC. What are your impressions of that system?

Q: I’ve read that you were surprised by the long-standing tension between UC and some labor groups… What have you done to change that?

Q: You’ve been back to Washington. What points are you trying to press with people there in terms of higher education policy or funding?

Q: Did you expect you would have protesters at your public appearances?

The answers can be found in http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_24850169/napolitano-uc-chief-eyes-tuition-sports-transfer-students

Events May Divert the Governor from MOOCs, etc., at the Regents in 2014

Jerry Brown will almost certainly be running for re-election in 2014. It doesn’t look like there will be much of a contest but there will be at least some effort devoted to the campaign.

But apart from re-election, Brown is facing some “legacy” problems. During his first iteration as governor, he wasn’t big – to say the least – on grand infrastructure, unlike his father Pat. However, this time around, there is the high-speed rail project and the water tunnel project, both grand and expensive. These projects are analogs to his dad’s freeways and state water project.

The high speed rail is running into problems of financing and negative court rulings. The water project also has financing and environmental obstacles. Currently, dry weather is causing water rationing in the Sacramento area. But it is unclear that the proposed water tunnels would address that issue. Indeed, the drought could raise the issue – very sensitive in the Bay Area – of diverting water to southern California.

Of course, the third legacy of Father Pat was higher ed expansion in the form of the Master Plan. But we are not going to be building more campuses of UC or CSU in the immediate future. And tuition isn’t going up in an election year.

So UC may get a break from gubernatorial attention in 2014. Brown wouldn’t want his rail and other plans to end like this:

Listen to the Regents Morning Session: Nov. 13, 2013 (including the Napolitano speech)

As noted in prior posts, yours truly is out of town and behind on listening to, and recording, the Regents meeting. I am now current through the morning of Nov. 13. That was the morning in which UC president Napolitano gave her speech on her goals for UC. Blog readers will recall that there was supposed to be a similar unveiling of goals in a speech awhile ago, but that turned out to be a booster/dud. This one was more significant, but more on that below.

Again, we provide audio archives of Regents meetings because regental policy is to preserve recordings only for one year. Why? No one will say.

The meeting started with public comments. Editorial: There is an extremely offensive group that comes and yells at the Regents about demands to fire Napolitano immediately. What they imagine they are accomplishing, other than offending everyone but themselves, is an interesting question. Obviously, the Regents are not going to fire Napolitano. She may turn out to be a good choice or a bad choice, but it’s time to get real folks and move on. They were there the day before, as blog readers will know. Apparently, they will come back. Apart from that group, there were representatives of AFSCME, which has a one-day strike scheduled for Nov. 20, and the union (UAW) that represents grad TAs. There were complaints about non-resident tuition and grad student fees. [It might be noted that towards the end of the open session, Assembly speaker Perez, an ex officio Regent, made somewhat cryptic remarks that suggested that some accommodation between the union(s) and Napolitano was under way.]

After the public comment session, there was a talk by UC-Berkeley Nobel prize winner Randy Schekman who lamented the squeeze on funding for public research universities.

The main event that got the bulk of media attention was the Napolitano speech noted above. In it she talked about concerns about affordability of UC, student aid, the one-time money she allocated from a “reserve” to undocumented DREAM students and grad students, freezing tuition for another year (2014-15), a search to avoid volatility in tuition, concern that the news media focuses on the “sticker price” of tuition rather than the actual price(s), the need for the state to do its part to pay for UC retirement plans and increased enrollment, a search for greater efficiency at UCOP, doing more to get additional funds from grants, donations, public-private partnerships, and tech transfers to industry, encouraging more community college transfers, and green energy goals for the campuses.

Editorial: Obviously, this speech was more substantive than the previous one. But it tended to avoid trade-offs. If you freeze tuition in good times, history has taught us that you get big jumps in tuition in bad times when the state pulls back. You need only to look at what happened under Governors Davis and Schwarzenegger for examples. If the governor won’t pay for increased enrollment and you encourage more community college transfers, that increase has to involve either a decrease in admissions of four year students (which she said she wants to avoid) or fewer dollars/student. Later in this session in a discussion of PhD education, Governor Brown kept saying that UC was not going to be “ten Harvards,” so comparing it with Harvard was not a selling point with him. That raises the nasty issue of whether UC is a tightly-knit system or a bunch of individual campuses in a loose federation, again a trade-off since it can’t be both. Also later in the program in a session on fund raising, it was observed that donors like their names carved on buildings, i.e., physical capital rather than human capital. In short, the speech was a shopping list of worthy goals. But it avoided priorities and nasty trade-offs. We provide a separate link to the speech below.

After the Napolitano speech, Academic Senate rep Bill Jacob reminded the Regents of the blending of research, teaching, and service. It is not possible to isolate these three elements at research universities. There was discussion of doctoral education with Brown’s “ten Harvards” comments and a review of fundraising with the lament (by Regent Lansing) of donors’ desires to see their names carved on buildings. (Suggestion by yours truly: As long as the campuses have bond-and-build bureaucracies, donors might be reminded that buildings are temporary. The bond-and-builders after a couple of decades will knock them down. You get more longevity out of programs that endow research and/or scholarships since those go on as long as there is money left in the till.)

Finally, there was a review of the Dept. of Energy labs with concerns expressed about changes in leadership on the UC side. President Napolitano mentioned the $80 million that UC is owed for retirement by the Dept. of Energy due to the federal sequester. (See our earlier post on this issue.)

UPDATE: http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2013/nov/14/uc-board-of-regents-approves-operations-budget/ and

http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/11/jerry-brown-offers-jesuitical-harshness-to-university-of-california.html

You can find a link to the entire open morning Regents session of Nov. 13, 2013 at:

or go to https://archive.org/details/UniversityOfCaliforniaRegentsMorningNov.132013

For just the Napolitano speech, click on the link below:

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Post by CalPolicy.

Listen to the UC Regents: Nov. 12, 2013

As blog readers will know, we post audio of Regents meetings because the current regental policy is only to post their meetings for a year. But the meetings live on here! Yours truly has various commitments this week that will slow the posting. But a link to yesterday’s meeting is below.

The public comment session included speakers complaining about lack of affirmative action at UC (blocked by Prop 209), inadequate services for disabled students (including those with mental problems), and complaints about the appointment of Janet Napolitano. The last took up a good deal of time with demands that the Regents should fire her, made in part by a group of local high school students.

In a section on an audit report, it was noted that the U.S. Dept. of Energy owes UC $80 million for retiree health costs of nuclear lab retirees, thanks to the sequester. The outside auditor didn’t treat this money as a receivable because some Congressional action is needed for the payment to be made. Regents were concerned that not treating the money as a receivable would seem to imply that UC had written off the cost. However, the auditor insisted that proper accounting standards were being followed.

When capital projects were discussed, Regents remain concerned that when projects are approved (which as blog readers will know is “always”), the campuses are given a certain leeway for cost overruns. It is not clear how this concern will be resolved. A concern was also expressed that when projects are proposed with a price tag for construction attached, the price tag may become a floor on bids that might otherwise come in lower.

A new building for a rape treatment center near Santa Monica-UCLA hospital was approved. The costs are being paid for by an outside operator of the center.

You can listen to the audio at the link below:

Note: Although it will be awhile before we can post the audio for today’s session of the Regents, President Napolitano announced there would be no tuition increase for 2014-15, according to news reports. See http://blogs.sacbee.com/capitolalertlatest/2013/11/university-of-california-president-proposes-tuition-freeze.html

Opening Bid on the Budget

We noted yesterday that the preliminary Regents’ agenda for next week did not yet include the underlying attachments. They are now available, in particular, a budget-related item.

Report from LA Times: [excerpt]

For the third straight year, UC students would see no tuition increase for the 2014-15 school year if state funding to the 10-campus system increases enough, according to a preliminary University of California budget released Monday. The budget proposal for next year said undergraduate tuition would remain at $12,192 before room, board and campus fees are added. Graduate and professional students pay more, and their basic fees would not rise either. But the commitment to freeze those fees may change if state revenue to UC does not increase by about $267 million, including extra money to help pay for pensions and to increase enrollment by about 1%, officials said…

Full story at http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-tuition-20131104,0,498993.story

The story above refers to this item (below) from the agenda: [excerpt]

State General Funds.

The University’s 2014-15 budget plan calls for a moderate base budget adjustment consistent with the Governor’s multi-year funding proposal. As noted above, the Governor’s proposal also calls for no increase in tuition and fees in 2014-15.

To help meet the University’s mandatory and high-priority costs in the absence of a tuition and fee increase, the University’s budget plan requests additional State funding to address the University’s employer contribution to the retirement plan and funding to support modest enrollment growth.

The plan calls for $267.1 million in new State General Funds, including:
* $142.2 million from a five percent base budget adjustment, consistent with the Governor’s multi-year funding plan; $4 million for reimbursement of annuitant health benefit costs;
* $64.1 million for the State’s share of the University’s contribution to the retirement system;
* $21.8 million for enrollment growth of one percent to allow the University to continue to meet its Master Plan commitment; and $35 million to help fund reinvestment in academic quality.
* $35 million to help fund reinvestment in academic quality
.
Source: http://regents.universityofcalifornia.edu/regmeet/nov13/f6.pdf

Note that CSU is also asking for more than what Jerry Brown may be willing to offer in its opening bid:

http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-calstate-trustees-20130923,0,1172843.story

However, as the Regents have pointed out at past meetings, CSU is under CalPERS so its retiree costs get picked up by the state without a fuss about who is responsible for them.