Under the plan, undergraduate students from families with household income of less than $150,000 would have their tuition and fees cut by two-thirds, bringing the cost below what it was nearly a decade ago… The speaker’s office estimates the program would cost the state about $1 billion per year, which would be raised by eliminating a corporate tax break that was approved in 2009 as part of budget negotiations between Democrats and Republicans… But Senate Republicans, who have not been briefed on the speaker’s measure, said they could not foresee approving any change, as the tax was a concession to them in negotiations.
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by Wyatt Buchanan, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: February 8th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office raised concerns with Gov. Jerry Brown’s higher education budget in a new report today, including his plans to tighten Cal Grant requirements and automatically increase funding if his tax plan passes… Brown made the 4 percent promise as a sweetener to his tax proposal, which he’s trying to bill as a plan for funding education and public safety. The analyst’s office recommended that lawmakers reject the 4 percent promise. Pledging to give automatic increases presents problems, the LAO said, because other parts of the budget could suffer, lawmakers would have little discretion if one higher education system needed more money than another, and the pledge ignores enrollment and inflation, among other reasons.
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by Kevin Yamamura, The Sacramento Bee.
Posted: February 8th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
While there is room to argue over the details of my calculation, there can be no denying that the accepted method for calculating the per-student “cost of delivering undergraduate education” is not just a little bit misleading—it is a big lie. I’m aiming that accusation not just at my own institution but at all research universities, both private and public. This ought to be a scandal—and some day it will be, yet none of the respectable leaders of higher education have been willing to face up to it. Aside from the grossly false information being given out by the research universities to students and their families (and to taxpayers and their representatives in government), academe’s distorted accounting habits poison the efforts of well-meaning scholars who rely on such data sources as IPEDS to conduct quantitative studies of our industry.
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by Charles Schwartz, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: February 7th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
With sophisticated analyses and an often-sardonic delivery, Ms. Wellman has been a pull-no-punches critic of fiscal policies that starve the institutions educating the biggest proportion of students—”public universities are getting screwed, and the community colleges in particular are getting screwed,” she says. She is just as dismissive of the “trophy-building exercises” of public and private institutions that elevate their research profiles by hiring professors who never teach or that dole out merit aid to enhance their admissions pedigrees. And don’t even get her started on the climbing-wall craze or colleges whose swimming pools “have those fake rivers for people to raft on.”
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by Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: February 5th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Senate Republicans pushed back against President Obama’s college-affordability agenda at an education-committee hearing Thursday, expressing doubts about the administration’s plans to reward colleges and states that hold down tuition and maintain their higher-education budgets… during a question-and-answer session with the under secretary of education, Martha J. Kanter, Mr. Burr asked whether states that trim their higher-education budgets after years of steady growth would be spurned from a proposed $1-billion grant competition for states that keep costs under control. “I find it incredible that we might exclude a state that ticks up a little more than others because they have held [tuition] down for so long,” he said. Ms. Kanter responded that the administration would judge states based on their “long-term policies in place to stabilize tuition”—suggesting that states would not be excluded from the grant competition on the basis of a one-year cut.
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by Kelly Field, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: February 2nd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Why does the University of California employ an armed police force on its campuses? That question, and the anger implied in its wording, was asked repeatedly Wednesday night by UC Berkeley students and faculty of top UC brass. Berkeley was a whistle-stop on their tour of campuses before they prepare UC’s official response to the use of batons and pepper spray against peaceful protesters last November. “I want to take issue with the idea that police on campus are in accordance with academic values,” Gina Patnaik, a doctoral student in English, told the officials and the crowd of about 50 people in Berkeley’s student union who had come to air their views. UC employs about 300 police officers across its 10 campuses.
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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.
Posted: February 2nd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
A UC Berkeley professor is working with former presidential candidate Ralph Nader to create an initiative for the November state ballot that would limit tuition increases in California’s public colleges. The idea to get an initiative on the ballot — whose specifics would be determined by UC Berkeley faculty and staff — was conceived in conversations between Nader and campus computer science professor Brian Barsky around tuition increases.
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by Christopher Yee, The Daily Californian.
Posted: February 2nd, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
As the federal budget tightens, university researchers have come under growing pressure to help convince policy makers of the importance of spending on science. Now they may get drafted to lobby legislators… The plan will involve identifying lawmakers whose support for federal research spending could be critical on a particular vote, and then asking university researchers in that member’s district to take steps that include inviting the lawmaker to the campus to get a stronger sense of the science and how it benefits the community, said Jennifer A. Hobin, the organization’s director of science policy.
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by Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Posted: January 30th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
President Mike Young said Obama showed he did not understand how the budgets of public universities work. Young said the total cost to educate college students in his state, which is paid for by both tuition and state government dollars, has gone down because of efficiencies on campus. While universities are tightening costs, the state is cutting their subsidies and authorizing tuition increases to make up for the loss. “They really should know better,” Young said. “This really is political theater of the worst sort.” … “We are putting colleges on notice,” Obama told an arena packed with cheering students. “You can’t assume that you’ll just jack up tuition every single year. If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.”
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by Staff, USA Today.
Posted: January 28th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The threat was that the activists were going to successfully block the street. At this point, people were shoved to the ground, dragged across the pavement and plastic pellets were shot at the crowd. I saw wounds left by these pellets on students I’ve seen in my own classrooms. There is ample video out there showing this. The UCPD threw people to the ground, the UCPD shot their new pellet guns into the crowd, the UCPD used force on us. The next day: UC administrators organized an Orwellian campaign to represent the violence of that incident as caused not by the UCPD but by the protesters. Even more bizarre was the eagerness for the administration to blame not students, but the public – as if the two should be distinguished from each other. In weekly letter to the campus community the Chancellor White claimed that “the disturbance of a few individuals” ruined the demonstration, and that they did not represent the “non-violent students and community members engaged in peaceful protest and exercising their right to free speech.” But the people beaten and shot at by the UCPD are our students; they are our colleagues. And they are our neighbors. We were all in it together. They are the public, and the public is us.
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by Jennifer Doyle, The Nation.
Posted: January 26th, 2012, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
