Tag Archives: higher education

Higher Ed Funding by Metrics?

Gov. Brown looks to tie state university funding to metrics

by Brian Leubitz

Gov. Brown isn’t one to really sit around and rest on a balanced budget. Though the May revise is still a few weeks away, he’s looking for some big ideas. This is certainly a big idea:

Gov. Jerry Brown wants to tie some state funding for California’s public universities to a host of new requirements, including 10% increases in the number of transfer students from community colleges and the percentage of freshmen graduating within four years.

Brown, who has repeatedly said the universities should be leaner and serve more students, is asking for equivalent increases in several other areas as well, according to a copy of his plan obtained by The Times. Those include raising the overall number of graduates and a stipulation that more students coming from community colleges finish their studies within two years.(LA Times)

Some members of the higher education community are not so enthused by the plan. The most obvious concern is that most of these metrics are issues which are almost entirely under the control of administration, rather than faculty or students. Matt Haney, Executive Director of the UC Students Association and an elected member of the SF school board, had this to say on the plan:

Welcome to the “No Child Left Behind” era for the UC. State funding, which is still grossly inadequate, being tied to “performance measures,” may mean the end of the public university in California as we know it…Slash our funding, ask us to do a lot more as demonstrated by external “outcomes” developed by people who aren’t educators, and then punish the students for any failure by the administration to meet those outcomes. At this point, not a fan

Of course, this isn’t the only higher education funding proposal on the table. Brown previously called for a tuition freeze during the Prop 30 campaign, contingent on the passage of Prop 30. With the Prop 30 revenues now flowing in, Brown will be under pressure to keep that promise. But his full higher education funding plan will flesh out many of the details around the bones that have already leaked out.

Higher education has always been in something of a weird position in California. It is clearly an investment in future economic prosperity. Take a look at the innovation surrounding all of the major UC&CSU campus sites. However, it is something that legislators look at and see an alternative funding source (ie students). And thus the dramatic cuts over the last few years.

It could be that some metrics-based pressure lights some fires under the administration of the UC and CSU systems, but the question is where does the money that we are gambling with come from? If metrics aren’t met, and funding is cut, who suffers? Maybe an administrator here or there will be laid off, but ultimately, the cuts would trickle down to students, staff and faculty.

Improving Cal Grants

Reforming Crucial Access Program for Higher Education

by Brian Leubitz

CalGrants, in their current form, have been around since the beginning of the last decade. So hopefully in that time we have learned a thing or two about works and what needs work. Back in 2004, the California Student Aid Commission looked at the new program and their report included some interesting numbers at the time:

In 2001-02, 61 percent of the Competitive Cal Grant recipients were under 25 years of age – a younger than anticipated recipient pool. After consultation with segmental representatives, the Commission adjusted the selection criteria to allow extra consideration for older, late-entry students. In 2002-03, 35 percent of the Competitive Cal Grant recipients were under 25 years of age.

In 2001-02, the majority (81 percent) of the Competitive Cal Grant recipients were from  families with annual incomes below $24,000. In 2002-03, 84 percent of new recipients had incomes under $24,000.

CalGrants were designed to facilitate access to higher education for older students as well as lower income students. And when available, they serve that purpose. However], considering the big cuts to the program over the last few years, the goals for the program may have been ratcheted down a notch. But, that is not to say that we can’t improve the system. Over the next week, a group of legislators will be highlighting their reform proposals to the system. Here are a few of those highlights:

  • AB 1241 – Weber (D-San Diego) – Extending Eligibility to 4 years after high school for Cal Grant A & B
  • AB 1285 – Fong (D-San Jose) – Increasing eligibility for first-year students
  • AB 1287 – Quirk-Silva (D-Orange County) – Decreasing paperwork for renewing Cal Grants
  • AB 1364 – Ting (D-SF) – Sets minimum Cal Grant B at $5900 for 2014-2015, increasing by California CPI
  • These changes all go a step towards making higher education more attainable, but ultimately, we need to increase funding to CalGrants to widen the breadth of the program’s success. Beyond our natural resources, businesses come to California for the extraordinary skilled labor that we have, much of that thanks to our higher ed system. Investing in our labor force means a stronger economy in the future.

    Opportunity Denied: CSU Freezes Enrollment

    System worried about further cuts

    by Brian Leubitz

    The UC and CSU systems stand to be some of the biggest winners (or losers) of the November election. If Prop 30, the Governor’s revenue initiative goes down, they will be facing over $250mil in cuts. That fact makes this story rather unsurprising:

    The university announced on Monday that because of $750 million in funding cuts in the 2011-12 school year and the prospect of another $250 million in losses if Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax initiative* does not pass, only 10 campuses will accept students in spring 2013, and even those campuses will enroll a limited number. (EdSource)

    This move will particularly hit students who are planning on transferring from community colleges. Many of these students will be waitlisted pending the outcome of the election, but this is no way to treat our future.  Gambling on funding, while seemingly necessary in this case, just isn’t a system that is sustainable in the long-term.

    Both the UC and CSU systems need a consistent revenue stream in order to appropriately plan for the future.

    Finally, A Real Chance for Public Higher Education Reform in California

    As a recent graduate of San Francisco State University, I am thrilled that there is finally momentum gaining in the movement to achieve real public higher education reform in California. In particular, the Middle Class Scholarship Act is an economically feasible way to make public higher education more affordable for all Californians.

    While I was a student at SFSU my tuition increased every semester. To make matters worse, I never qualified for financial assistance to help fund my education because the State determined that my parents could afford to pay not only my tuition but also those of both of my sisters.

    California’s public college students are continuing to struggle. The CSU Board of Trustees’ recent decision to close Spring 2013 enrollment is just one of the devastating blows that our public higher education students have been forced to endure, with no end in sight.

    Luckily, help for California’s public university students and their families could be on the way. The Middle Class Scholarship Act recently proposed by California State Assembly Speaker John A. Perez is exactly the kind of public higher education reform that California’s students and their families need in these difficult financial times.

    If it is approved by two-thirds of the California State Legislature, the Middle Class Scholarship Act will provide scholarships to approximately 150,000 CSU students and roughly 42,000 UC students who have family incomes less than $150,000 and whom do not already have their fees covered. These Middle Class Scholarships will slash student fees by two-thirds. Additionally, our California Community Colleges will receive $150 million to address their unique needs. The Middle Class Scholarships will be paid for in full by closing a wasteful corporate loophole that only benefits out-of-state businesses.  

    The Middle Class Scholarship is an innovative solution to California’s public higher education crisis that will help students achieve their dreams, while at the same time, ensure that our Golden State has a strong workforce that is prepared to meet the challenges of the 21st century economy.

    I know that as a student, it is difficult just to make time to study and to work but I strongly urge all of California’s UC, CSU and Community College Students to do whatever they can to help pass the Middle Class Scholarship Act and to fight for the higher education reform they deserve. From signing and sharing this petition and tweeting and posting Facbook messages to your State legislators and Governor Brown (if you don’t know who your State legislators are, you can look them up here) to organizing on campus and gathering signatures, no action is too small or insignificant. Keep the faith and, most importantly, keep making your voices heard.

    Please embrace the help of the politicians who want to help The Middle Class Scholarship Act become law. Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, Speaker Perez, Senators Darrell Steinberg, and Leland Yee and many other State leaders have consistently stood in solidarity with California’s college students and have fought tirelessly against every single higher education budget cut and fee increase. To pass the Middle Class Scholarship Act, the support and expertise of these politicians will be invaluable.    

    If California’s public college students continue to come together and rally the support of our State legislators to pass the Middle Class Scholarship Act, I think we will finally see the dawn of real public higher education reform in California.

    What of Higher Education?

    SF State President says Gov. Brown hasn’t stood up for higher education

    by Brian Leubitz

    Yesterday we saw the scary fact that tuition would exceed state support in the UC system.  Today, the long-standing president of San Francisco State, Robert Corrigan, made his feelings known about the current budget situation and the governor’s leadership in an exit interview with the Bay Citizen.

    The president of San Francisco State University said Monday that Gov. Jerry Brown “doesn’t seem to appreciate high-quality education in California.” …

    “I think we are looking at a five-year budget] problem in California,” Corrigan said in a telephone interview. “At my age, I am not likely to be around for five years.” Corrigan plans to return to his research in American history after retiring. “The next president needs to deal with the Legislature and the governor as best that they can,” he said. ([The Bay Citizen)

    President Corrigan is leaving after 24 years as president of the San Francisco campus amongst mixed opinions.  Many seem to think that he could have done more to protect students, while others seem resigned to the situation in Sacramento.  Ultimately, the question really can’t be answered at any of the individual campuses of either CSU or UC.  It is a failing of our state, our leaders, and our voters.  Together we have conspired to deprive our institutions of higher education of the necessary funding and then essentially required them to make the education cost prohibitive to much of the state’s population.

    It is easy to question Gov. Brown, especially in hindsight.  But, with structural problems blooming like a stinking rose in Sacramento, the Governor is hardly the only person worthy of blame.  It is a sad fact that we once were wholeheartedly committed to education, today we cannot say that.

    A Sad Day for Higher Education

    Tuition will exceed general fund support for the first time for UC system this year

    by Brian Leubitz

    There was once a vision for education in California that allowed us to dream big.  It allowed the state to have expectations for the future, because we were investing in it through education.  We went so far as to build a master plan that included tuition free higher education.  Those days now seem like an extremely distant dream.

    For the first time, the total amount that University of California students pay in tuition this year will surpass the funding the prestigious public university receives from the state. It is a historic shift for the UC system and part of a national trend that is changing the nature of public higher education.

    Propelled by budget crises in California and elsewhere, the burden of paying for education at a public college or university, once heavily subsidized by taxpayers, is shifting to students and their families. (LA Times)

    While the Right is crowing about class warfare, they are doing their damnedest to ensure that those below them can’t work their way up.  Higher education, for several generations, has been the most significant way of upward mobility.  Decreasing access further cements that the rich stay rich.  A sad day for the California dream, indeed.

    UC Follows CSU to the Tuition Increase Game

    Yesterday, it was CSU’s turn to raise tuition.  Apparently, today is the UC’s turn:

    University of California regents today voted to raise tuition by about $1,070, sending the total cost to $12,192 for the upcoming school year.

    After a recently approved $650 million cut in state funding, UC regents said they had no choice but to raise tuition to close about a quarter of the system’s $1 billion budget deficit. When combined with a previous hike, tuition will be 18 percent more — about $1,890 — in fall 2011 than it was in fall 2010. Each campus also charges undergraduates about $1,000 in additional fees. (SacBee)

    The university systems are both on the hook for another $100 million in the triggered cuts if we don’t reach the higher, hopeful, revenue figure. By the way, the Controller announced today that we aren’t actually $230 million behind where we need to be, but $85 million, because somebody forgot to tally a big check from the unclaimed property account.

    That being said, the discussion about the additional cuts was bumped until a later date, but don’t be shocked if more increases aren’t on the horizon.

    One vote against the increase: LG Newsom.

    “The biggest threat to our democracy is income inequality, the loss of the middle class,” Newsom said. “And here we are once again, putting the nail in the coffin of the middle class. That’s exactly who gets hurt in this debate.”

    The Inevitable Consequences: Homeless Students

    Over the last few budget cycles, the inevitable became reality.  We started spending more money on prisons than on higher education.  Tuition (oh, sorry, that’s not tuition, those are “fees”) skyrocketed as we stopped subsidizing education for the next generation of California’s leaders. Sure, we aren’t the only state doing so, but the magnitude of our cost increases should make any one shudder.

    For example, as I entered UC Berkeley to get my policy degree, the school had just tacked on a $5,000 “professional fee.” That’s just another 5 grand that will be tacked on to the loans of students that really aren’t gearing up to make millions.  Sure, the federal government, over the last few years, has radically changed the student loan system in a number of beneficial ways. (Including some forgiveness for public employees)  However, the sheer amount of debt for students is becoming unmanageable.

    And of course, we shouldn’t be surprised to hear that we reap what we sow:

    For many college students and their families, rising tuition costs and a tough economy are presenting new challenges as college bills come in. This has led to a little-known but growing population of financially stressed students, who are facing hunger and sometimes even homelessness. (NPR)

    The story (listen up top) goes on to chronicle the plight of some of these students. They end up skipping meals, couch surfing through the semester, working two jobs, or being forced to drop out.  These are the choices that we are offering to our students.

    Schools like UCLA will work with students to help out, but the fact that many students simply won’t talk about these issues along with the growing numbers mean that not every student will get the help that they need.

    Lest anybody think that we haven’t raised any taxes, just check out the fee bills of our students. Sure, call them fees with a thousand different names, but taxes are what they really are.  Instead of using a more fair and progressive taxation structure, we’re piling on debt to the backs of our students, and really, our future.

    I’m glad that the Chamber is spending so much time trying to protect their $1.5 billion tax cut they got last year.  Perhaps they can hire some of the unemployed students in their “extra time” to help out with that campaign. I hear they are looking for some jobs.

    A New Deal for California Part 3 – Educate and Punish

    Note: this is a cross-post from The Realignment Project.

    Introduction:

    In part 1 of a New Deal for California, I discussed why any effort to rebuild the state must begin with a frontal assault on high unemployment as the only reliable means of achieving budget stability – as opposed to self-defeating quests for balance via austerity. In part 2, I studied how the quest for a more perfect democracy is inextricably linked to a renewal of democratic control over the state's own revenues.

    Today, I want to discuss two areas of policy that are among the largest spending categories in the California state budget, but which also represent two faces of the state, and two approaches to developing its youth, and two sets of values – namely, education and prisons.

    Arnold's recent proposal to put a floor under higher education at 10% of the state budget and a ceiling over prisons at 7% of the state budget is only the most recent example of a long trend of discussing the two in the same breath. As I discussed in the linked article, Schwarzenegger's approach is fundamentally flawed, a mirage of egalitarianism masking a reality of utter callousness. A moral society cannot pay for the future of its most talented youth through the deliberate immiseration of its least advantaged.

    However, a New Deal for California will have to grapple with the reality that California will either educate or incarcerate its young, and that the power to choose lies with us.

    Higher Education:

    In my previous posts on higher education, I've tried to get across the idea that the purpose of public higher education is to expand and improve the functioning of democracy, that higher education is a social and public good, not a private commodity, and that the way a public university is run speaks volumes about the values of the society. If there is an overarching theme here, it's that the choices a state makes on higher education both reflect and shape the nature of its society. A state where the children of the poor and the children of the rich are equally limited only by the boundaries of ambition and ability will be a society is genuinely one of equal opportunity and healthy, meritocratic competition. At the same time, states should also think of higher education as a social investment in a high-road economy, distinguished by high levels of skill and education, high wages, and high living standards.

    A New Deal for California is absolutely about making that investment and choosing that high-road, but one of the things you see in public discourse about higher education in California in progressive circles is a certain fuzziness – when it's razor-sharp conviction that wins the day in politics. There's the required genuflections in the direction of the 1960 Master Plan, and perhaps even a statement about how “college should be free!” or how cheap it was to attend the U.C when they were young, but nothing about how we proceed from where we are to were we want to go.

    By contrast, I think a New Deal for California had to start with a genuine commitment to a new Master Plan for California that charts a path for gradually reducing tuition to $0 for the U.Cs, CSUs, and Community Colleges over the next 20 years. We should be clear about how much this will cost: it will take about $1.7 billion a year to make the U.C tuition-free, about $2 billion a year to make the CSUs tuition-free (about $5,000 a year in tuition times 417,000 students), and about $1.78 billion a year ($614 a year times 2.9 million students) to make the Community Colleges tuition. Altogether, we're talking about $5.8 billion per year, or an extra $290 million per year.

    Assemblyman Torrico's AB 656, which would establish a 10% excise tax on oil extraction to provide about $2 billion a year to higher education (a system already in place in Texas, which funds the University of Texas through an oil excise tax). That gets us about a third of the way to our goal. The rest could be assembled from a variety of revenue sources – this is not beyond the means of one of the richest states in the Union,  and one of the richest economies in the world.

    One idea that has been suggested in the United Kingdom by Ed Milliband (Labour M.P, Shadow Energy and Climate Change Secretary) is to replace tuition costs with a “grad tax.” The idea would be that, instead of requiring students to pay tuition and go into debt up-front, which acts as a prohibitive burden for many working-class students and constraints the future career choices of graduates, that we instead ask graduates to pay a progressive surcharge of between “0.25% and 2% of their income over a 20-year period,” enabling graduates to contribute, according to their ability to pay, to higher education whether they work for a non-profit or a Fortune 500 company.

    As I have said before, the ultimate goal that we should be thinking about is not 100% of the youth population attending university, but rather that 100% of the youth population being able to achieve whatever level of skill or training that their ability and ambition provides for. This means treating skills training- whether it comes in the form of a union apprenticeship, vocational or technical college, or a professional course in a community college – as just as important as any other form of education. It means paying more attention to helping students get employed as well as enrolled (such as is the case in the German and Japanese education systems). And it means making sure that students graduate high school able to take advantage of higher education/training.

    A Word About K-12:

    I'll only say a few words onK-12 education, since it's not an area of public policy that I've actually done much work on. As someone who's been a TA at the U.C for four years, I can certainly attest to the fact that California needs to do a better job at preparing students, both for college and employment, because it's quite surprising how many of the top 12.5% of high schoolers in California have real problems with constructing essays or interpreting reading.

    Here's what I'll say – I believe that the “Educational Equality Project” reform community has over-emphasized college preparation, has tended to over-emphasize incentives over resources, and relies too much on an economistic model of corporate efficiency. I think primary and secondary schools should emphasize employment as well as college, and experiment with the German and Japanese model of partnering with employers to offer students additional paths for career development; in part, I think this comes from an approach to manifest class and racial inequalities that opts for individual, behavioral intervention (assuming that schools can “solve for” poverty without outside interventions on social conditions, and emphasizing college attendance without consideration for labor market conditions).

    Moreover, I think reformers have under-sold the degree of resources that will be needed to correct inequalities in resources (which is why California needs to move to equalization of funding across school districts) as well as social and cultural capital. Things like increasing instruction time, providing tutoring to struggling students, and lowering class sizes are all well and good – I'd even add commitments to expand Head Start to 100% of those within 150% of poverty, and extend it, “Follow Through” style, to prevent “Head Start fade” in primary school –  but they will require a significant commitment of funds to work.

    I think the rhetorical emphasis on incentives over resources comes from two sources: first, it comes from the unspoken recognition that a lot of the key policies adopted in heavily-promoted charter schools aren't costless, which raises questions about scaling. KIPP is lauded among EEP-style reformers, but a 60% longer school day/year, 24/7 teacher availability, and weekend work costs, and not just in dollar terms – 50%-plus turnover rates are common in KIPP schools. Second, it comes from what Matt Yglesias refers to as a “Green Lantern” theory about education – if teacher productivity and efficiency are what matters, then you don't have to deal with the fact that California schools are 43rd in the nation in per-pupil spending, because all you have to do is push teachers hard enough. At the end of the day though, resources are real and it is not impossible for California to commit to raising its commitment to the top 10 in the nation over a period of 10-20 years, similar to the commitment to tuition-free higher education as well.

    Finally, as I've said before, I think the debate over accountability and results has become poisoned by the link between the models of accountability used by reformers and ideas about corporate efficiency, leading to a massive level of distrust among teachers and their unions. I've said it before, but it bears repeating – I'd be very interested to see how EEP reformers would react to an offer to have accountability and performance targets negotiated right into collective bargaining contracts, and put the unions in charge of and responsible for teacher quality.

    Prisons:

    All of this discussion of resources brings us to the piggy bank that both Schwarzenegger and I are hoping to use to improve the quality of education – California's overstuffed prison population, the second-largest in the nation. Right now, California imprisons 616/100,000 persons, and its prison population has been growing 500% over the last twenty years. This expansion has led to a growing budgetary burden, overcrowding, and a series of lawsuits over health and safety standards. No one particularly disputes that something needs to be done, but there are different ways to go about it.

    Schwarzenegger's vision is to combine privatizationand outsourcing – essentially to shove our prisons off our books and avoid changing the way we deal with our offenders. This is morally unacceptable for any sane society. Private prisons are rightly notorious for corruption, abuse, and the further cutting of corners on medical care, living conditions, and safety standards. Shifting our prisons to Mexico is simply an attempt to do privatization without getting tripped up by lawsuits filed in American courts when the inevitable lawsuits alleging subhuman standards emerge. California should certainly commit to keeping prison spending below 7% of the state budget, but this is not a just way to do it.

    However, there are ways to solve our prison problems. California's shift to drug courts and rehabilitation has paid dividends in the form of 10,000 fewer prisoners on drugs charges than in the 1990s, but there are still 30,000 prisoners on non-violent drugs charges who could be better dealt with outside the prison system. The bigger target is California's broken parole system – about 70% of parolees are re-incarcerated (the vast majority of cases being not new criminal violations but rather some technical violation of the terms of parole), at a rate that has increased six-fold in the last 20 years. As a result, about two-thirds of prison admissions are parolees rather than new offenders. There are better ways to handle our parolee problem than the current system of catch and release, and solving our parole problem would largely solve our overcrowding problem.

    Dealing with these two factors would allow California's criminal justice system, including the police, courts, prisons, and parole systems, to focus on doing a better job with the prisoners we've got. This means more, not less, effort directed at deterring violent crime and higher rates of arrest; this means freeing up resources to separate out first-time and non-violent offenders from hard-core criminals and violent offenders, with an eye towards reducing our state's abysmally high recidivism rate. In the end, being smart about crime works better than toughness for toughness' sake.

    On an ironic note, one of the few truly successful anti-recidivism strategies in the U.S has been the oft-targeted, poorly-funded college education programs. Expanding the commitment of college for all to the prisons might itself help to solve our prison problem.

    Side-note – on Interdependent Parts:

    In earlier segments of this series, I talked about the need for an overarching vision for California, beyond just the policy-specific pieces. To that end, it's important to see how education and prison policy fit as parts of a larger whole. For example, let's examine the impact of full employment policy and changes to democratic governance and revenue on these two areas of public policy.

    To begin with, full employment would greatly increase the public revenues available for K-12 and higher education. It would also add on a crucial back-stop to our system of educational development, ensuring that U.C and CSU and CCC graduates who've received incredibly expensive training don't get thrown on to an overcrowded labor market (as is happening now) where they can't find work, leaving their training to go to waste. It also means that rather than focusing solely on college attendance as our only strategy for getting kids out of poverty that we can offer them a chance at high-wage full time employment. Prior to the unraveling of high-wage labor in the 1980s, a high school graduate who had neither interest nor aptitude for an academic career could get a job for life as a skilled, semi-skilled, or even unskilled worker and be assured of economic security and a middle-class standard of living. With full employment, there's no reason that we can't build our way to an economy that provides opportunity to those kids as well as the college-bound.

    Full employment would also greatly reduce our prison burden. We know that anywhere from one-third to two-thirds of prison admissions are unemployed at the time of incarceration, that many property crimes are associated with unemployment, and that the increased difficulty of finding employment as an ex-offender is a major cause of recidivism. While certainly not a silver bullet (violent crime is not particularly correlated with employment rates), full employment can only help. (On a slightly more cynical note, one of the reasons why prison guard unions have resisted parole reform, decriminalization, and other efforts that might reduce the prison population is out of a desire to protect the jobs of their members. In a full employment economy, where workers could be assured of having a job, this political inertia could be more easily overcome).

    A similar case is true for democracy and revenues. A more functional democracy, where legislators could more easily match our revenues to the level and kind of goods and services demanded by the people, is one where the kinds of commitments we want to make to both higher and primary education can be made, and where reforms to our prisons systems can be more transparently and directly debated and carried out.

    Conclusion:

    There are 159,000 students at the University of California. They are among the top 12.5% of our youth, the most talented, the best educated, with the greatest likelihood to succeed. There are 170,000 prisoners in the California prison system – they are disproportionately young, non-white, and less-educated. Even when they are released, they will find it more difficult to find employment, housing, and credit. To place the burden of the best prepared on the least prepared is to compound injustice with unfairness.

    Students in California March Today, I Stand with Them

    Students at public universities in California are planning a series of demonstrations across the state protesting tuition hikes today. While a few isolated incidents in recent weeks have provided fodder for some in the media to dismiss their concerns, the students’ cause is incredibly important. If we continue to yearly raise tuition in California far beyond inflation, we threaten to derail all that has enabled my home state to prosper in decades past.

    It is no accident that the Golden State’s Golden Age of economic innovation coincided with the establishment of and continued investment in the best public university system in the world. Fifty years ago, forward-thinking policymakers declared that California would be a state where higher education was the birthright of every qualified resident. Since then, we’ve become the world’s great innovator in computers, biotechnology, space exploration, and clean technology.

    Unfortunately, the vision that made California one of the largest and most diverse economies on the planet has fallen to the wayside in recent years, as Governor Schwarzenegger and state lawmakers have decided that it’s politically easier to balance state budgets on the backs of students.

    The result? Student fees have more than doubled at the University of California and California State University systems over the past decade, and enrollment was reduced by more than 45,000 in the past two years. When you price students out of a college education, you don’t just harm the individual. You deny the state the future teachers, nurses, and engineers necessary to propel our economy forward.

    There’s more…

    Undergraduate Student Fee Increases at UC and CSUAccording to the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California, if California fails to significantly boost its college enrollment rates soon, we will have one million fewer college graduates than required to keep pace with the growth of our economy by 2025.

    “California faces a skills gap,” PPIC’s Hans Johnson explains. “There will not be enough young adults with a college education to meet the increase in demand for highly educated workers after the baby boomers retire.”

    Other studies show that for every dollar the state invests in UC and CSU, it gets back $5.67 and $4.41 respectively in long term economic output. Taking a long view, higher education in California pays for itself and then some, meaning every qualified student we force away from a higher education is a dent in California’s productivity and output. Taxing students is simply bad fiscal policy. Luckily, there’s a better way.

    California can maintain its commitment to higher education without taking a penny more away from students or the general population. California is the only oil-producing state in the nation without an oil severance tax. When the building blocks of our economic development are in jeopardy, why should we let the oil companies take California’s oil for free?

    The University of Texas has been endowed by an oil severance tax since the 1800s, and in 2007, then-Alaska Governor Sarah Palin instituted a 25 percent oil severance tax in her home state. If it works for Texas and Alaska, why shouldn’t California consider it?

    In January, the California Assembly approved AB 656, a bill by Assemblymember Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont, CA) that would follow the Texas model by taxing oil production in California to help fund higher education. The 9.9 percent oil severance tax created in the bill would generate nearly $2 billion for UC, CSU, and California’s community colleges, helping to bring enrollment closer to the state’s needs and helping to reduce the burden imposed on students struggling to stay afloat.

    This week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the formation of the California State University system. Since 1960, it has conferred 2.5 million degrees and helped create a broad swath of Californians prepared to contribute to California’s economic development. For most of my lifetime, California’s system of higher education has been the envy of the world, and we have reason to celebrate our past success.

    Yet the history of human civilization is replete with examples of great societies that fell into decline when they no longer prioritized education. What will happen to California if we continue to systematically defund higher education at the expense of our future workforce?

    You can call the draconian increases in tuition happening to California’s students taxes or fees. Whatever they are, they are bad economics. Our students are right to be angry, and for the future of California, I stand with them.

    Congressman John Garamendi (D-Walnut Creek) represents California’s 10th Congressional District. As California’s Lieutenant Governor from 2007 to 2009, he served as a University of California regent and California State University trustee.