University of California students will likely face a steep midyear tuition increase if voters reject Gov. Jerry Brown’s tax initiative. The 10-campus system will need to consider raising tuition by as much as 20 percent in January if the November ballot measure fails, according to documents posted online ahead of next week’s UC Board of Regents meeting. Under that scenario, in-state undergraduate tuition would rise by $2,472 to $14,664.
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by Terence Chea, The San Jose Mercury News.
Posted: July 10th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
“City College is not closing. We will not let that happen,” Board of Trustees President John Rizzo told the dozens of students, alumni, employees and others who attended the meeting at the main Ocean Avenue campus, one of nine that dot the city. Each trustee repeated the reassuring message, hoping to calm fears that have spawned a “Save City College” movement in the week since the regional Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges concluded that City College is so badly managed and financially unstable it should shut down if its extensive problems aren’t addressed by March 15. The trustees and Fisher also emphasized the work before them, including learning to manage the college better, most likely serving fewer students on fewer campuses and rescuing the school’s dangerously low reserves.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: July 10th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Anger over the cost of college was evident during the Occupy protests last fall, when graduates railed about their debt and police wielding pepper spray and batons confronted students protesting tuition hikes. But it’s not just an issue for the political fringe. Polls show the cost of college is a big worry for most Americans. Seventy-five percent believe college is “too expensive for most Americans to afford,” according to a Pew Research Center survey earlier this year, while 71 percent say “it’s harder for today’s young people to pay for college than it was for their parents’ generation.” Californians in particular are concerned about college costs and blame state politicians, according to a 2011 survey by the Public Policy Institute of California. The poll found that 75 percent of Californians believe students have to borrow too much to pay for college, while 70 percent disapprove of the Legislature’s handling of higher education.
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by Laurel Rosenhall, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: July 8th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
But a key clue about why a huge, seemingly solid institution like City College reached the point of possible closure is evident on page 4 of the 66-page evaluation released Tuesday. There, even as the evaluators praise the college’s commitment to students, they conclude that the administrators and faculty who run the school are a squabbling, mistrustful lot. “There exists a veil of distrust among governance groups that manifests itself as an indirect resistance to board and administrative decision-making authority,” says the report, which points to a confusing structure in which everyone – chancellor, vice chancellors, faculty, staff and students – has a say.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: July 7th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Under the guarantees, the price stays the same for the duration of a student’s education. Each year’s freshmen pay a higher rate, which is then guaranteed through their years in college. But tuition guarantees do nothing to prod colleges to manage their expenses better or otherwise control the price of higher education. Though they make financial planning more predictable, they could cost families more in the end. Colleges would have to guess at their own expenses over several years, which gives them an incentive to protect themselves against unforeseen costs by overcharging for the freshman year. There are other possible consequences. About 1 in 3 college students transfers to another school at some point. If tuition freezes become the default model for colleges, students would feel less able to change schools because they would be entering at a new, probably higher tuition.
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by The Editors, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 6th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Gov. Jerry Brown has appointed two people to the California State University board of trustees, according to the Governor’s Office. Lupe Garcia, 43, from Alameda, has been a lawyer for Gap Inc. since 1999… Hugo Morales, 63, of Fresno, has been executive director at Radio Bilingüe Inc. since 1980. He served as an adjunct lecturer of the La Raza Studies Program at Cal State Fresno from 1976 to 1979… The CSU board still has five vacancies, including one student position.
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by Laurel Rosenhall, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: July 6th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The poorly run City College of San Francisco has eight months to prove it should stay in business, yet must “make preparations for closure,” evaluators ordered Tuesday. The stunning verdict by the Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges could result in the closure of California’s largest college and a fixture of higher education in one of the nation’s wealthiest cities. It has 90,000 students. Only accredited colleges can receive public funding under state law. But City College’s failure to fix serious, long-standing problems of leadership and fiscal planning means that the accrediting commission could vote as early as next June to yank the school’s all-important certification, said Barbara Beno, commission president.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: July 4th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Over the past 23 years, California constructed roughly one new prison per year, at a cost of $100 million each, while it built only one new public college during the same period. Nationwide, spending on prisons has risen six times faster than spending on higher education. As I protest education cuts, I’m so often told, “We just don’t have the money.” It’s a lie. We do have the money. We just choose to spend it on prisons. Why is this not a front and center issue in the presidential campaign? Largely casualties of our misguided “war on drugs,” and vigorously promoted at the federal level by the “drug czar” and a $15 billion annual budget, the number of incarcerated Americans has quadrupled since 1980.
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by Lisa Bloom, CNN.
Posted: July 3rd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
While student debt is rising, parents’ ability to pay without resorting to debt is declining. Fed data show that the income of the typical American family, adjusted for inflation, declined from 2007 to 2010. Their wealth was down almost 40% — back to levels not seen since the early 1990s. Separate data show that household income is back to levels of a decade and a half ago. Meanwhile, the Education Department released data showing that during the period 2008-10, tuition at four-year public universities was up 15%, and in some states, such as Georgia, California and Arizona, up more than 40%. This is not a surprise: With states responding to slow growth in tax revenues by cutting back on support for higher education, universities had no choice. With tuition up and families less able to help their children, borrowing is the only option for many students. And they’re stuck with the debt. Unlike other debt, student loans cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.
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by Joseph E. Stiglitz, USA Today.
Posted: July 3rd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
A 24-year-old UC alumnus has begun gathering signatures for a proposed state constitutional amendment that would freeze undergraduate tuition at UC, Cal State and community colleges at the levels students paid when they first enrolled. Increases could occur with each incoming freshman group… Georgia’s 35 public colleges and universities adopted guaranteed tuition in 2006. But only three years later, the plan was dropped for new students as state budget cuts took a toll. “It was just unsustainable,” system spokesman John Millsaps said. More important, critics contend the guarantees increase tuition for younger students faster than if pain is shared by all. “It can have some advantages in easing uncertainties but it does not make college more affordable,” said Sandy Baum, a higher education policy analyst who is a senior fellow at George Washington’s graduate school of education.
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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: July 3rd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
