Daily Archives: March 11, 2009

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Tuesday Open Thread

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We missed a day with Ye Olde Open Thread, so this may be an expanded version:

• Good for Gordon Brown, attacking Prop. 8 as “unacceptable.”  It’s kind of curious that he brought it up at all, even in context, but I’m glad he did, especially the part where he said, “This shows why we have always got to be vigilant, always got to fight homophobic behaviour and any form of discrimination.”

• OC Progressive asks Kevin Drum 5 questions, and on the 2/3 requirement, he calls it “senseless” but says it’s impossible to change it through the initiative process because we’ve tried before and got whomped.  Not only do I think opinions have changed in the wake of budget hysteria, but they will continue to change, since the budget is still in desperate crisis, and we’ll see plenty more Yacht Party obstruction between now and June 2010 or whenever such a measure is on the ballot.  Drum supports a constitutional convention as “less impossible than the initiative process,” even though it would involve the initiative process twice, once to convene it and once to pass the new constitution.  I obviously don’t see the initiative process as an insurmountable barrier, but that reasoning is weird to me.

• Here’s another John Galt-worshipper in the Congressional Republican caucus.  Do they know Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction?  

• Speaking of works of fiction, here’s Victor Davis Hanson’s column in the Fresno Bee.  Apparently California’s big problem is that the weather is too nice and it makes us entitled.

• After he and his staff broke all kinds of campaign finance and public disclosure laws and showed multiple ethical lapses in accepting gifts from industry with business before the state, Arnold Schwarzenegger has instituted an ethics policy.  As a point of reference, he became Governor in 2003.

• More from the decline of the American newspaper – Sacramento-based McClatchy is cutting 1,600 jobs, and three of their 30 daily papers, including the SacBee, the Modesto Bee and the Fresno Bee, are right here in California.  I think you’ll see more journalists jump into public policy work as a result.

• CA-48: Beth Krom is obviously serious about her challenge to John Campbell – she just launched a temporary campaign website.

• In the aftermath of President Obama’s shift of federal policy on stem cell research, UC-Merced is building a new stem cell facility.

Budget

Destroying Higher Education To…Well, To Destroy It

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I don’t know how many times I have read this kind of article this decade, but it’s still once too often:

Facing a significant budget shortfall, the University of California plans to increase tuition at its 10 campuses by nearly 10 percent by July, in time for the summer session.

The proposed 9.3 percent fee increase would raise basic tuition for undergraduate students from $7,126 a year to about $7,789. In addition, various student services fees are also expected to rise….

Birgeneau said middle-class families will bear the brunt of the tuition increase.

Under the proposal, families earning more than $100,000 would pay the full fee increase. Families earning from $60,000 to $100,000 would pay half the fee increase, or about 4.65 percent. Families earning less than $60,000 would not be subject to the fee increase.

Even considering this graduated level of increased tuition, the price is unsustainable. An annual tuition of $7,500 is out of the reach of most families, period. It’s nearly double what I paid from 1996 to 2000, and is a 570% increase over what a UC grad would have paid from 1961 to 1965. Student loans might make up the difference, but those are much more difficult to get during a credit crunch and even if you can get one, they’ll be an anchor around your neck for decades, preventing you from finding financial security.

As I argued here back in October 2007, this is all likely part of a deliberate move to privatize public education slowly but surely over time. The Schwarzenegger Administration in 2004 rolled out a plan to raise fees and cut funding in order to accomplish this privatization goal.

Although the UC and CSU systems (which are likely to follow UC in making their own fee increases soon) remain officially public entities, they have been effectively privatized over time, as their funding now depends on private giving or student payments. The state contribution is now becoming almost incidental – with this recent budget nearly 80% of UC funding is coming from sources other than the state of California.

Even with the massive fee increases, educational quality isn’t necessarily going to be sustained. New faculty hires are going to be dramatically scaled back, meaning new profs who bring new ideas and fresh blood to the university – and who often bring the best teaching to the classroom – will be fewer in number.

The original goal of the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education was to guarantee access to college and affordability for those who were qualified in order to grow the middle class in California. It worked spectacularly, creating one of the leading economies of the globe over the last 50 years. But in the last 20 years this has begun to ebb, as fewer people can afford higher ed. And as the California Budget Project’s study A Generation of Inequality found, young college educated Californians have had a harder time finding work than those with just a high school diploma while they are saddled with debts they cannot pay off.

In Vietnam they “destroyed the village in order to save it.” Here in California, it seems clear that the goal is just to destroy higher education  and the economic mobility and the foundation of the middle class along with it. It’s time for us to determine how to reverse this trend.