Legal experts said most of the censorship appeared to be illegal, and the district’s chancellor on Thursday promised changes… A similar request for trustee emails in August 2010 also led the district to censor documents, but to a far lesser extent than it did this year. And Peralta attorneys backed off some censorship last year after this newspaper contested some instances. The censorship contradicts transparency promises Peralta leaders made as they consider asking East Bay voters to approve a parcel tax in June. Allen also told the Alameda County grand jury this year that the district would “improve transparency and accountability” in response to its critical report — the second consecutive year the panel has criticized the district. Peralta trustees have made the same promise.

Read full article [here].
by Matt Krupnick, The San Jose Mercury News.

Posted: October 21st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The Online Instruction Pilot Project will launch roughly 20 to 25 online courses at nine campuses beginning in January. Faculty and researchers will evaluate the courses, and if the data suggest the courses have a positive impact on students’ learning outcomes, UC will push to make online instruction a permanent part of the undergraduate experience. The idea is to create UC-quality courses that can expand access to students while also generating extra revenue during increasingly tough budgetary times… But leaders of the University Council – American Federation of Teachers, which represents the system’s more than 3,000 non-tenured lecturers and librarians, are concerned the university’s push toward online instruction could threaten lecturers’ jobs and degrade the quality of a UC education.

Read full article [here].
by Erica Perez, California Watch.

Posted: October 21st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

It’s been 20 years since Patrick Callan, maybe our most thoughtful analyst of higher education policy, observed that just as waves of poor and minority students were nearing college age, the proportion of state budgets allocated to college and university support was going down. The decline has only gotten steeper in the years since. In California, as in many other states, that may be more than coincidence. It’s not conscious racism – not in the majority of cases anyway. But it raises the first of a series of disturbing questions about what Callan calls our dysfunctional higher education system.

Read full article [here].
by Peter Schrag, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: October 21st, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Since 2002, lawmakers said, tuition costs have grown from 12 percent of an average family’s budget to 19 percent. “It is much harder to send your kid to school today than it was 20 years ago,” said state Rep. Jeff Espich, a Republican lawmaker who chairs the budget committee, in the hearing. As a result of the public pressure, Indiana State University reduced its planned tuition increase for in-state students from 3.5 percent to 1.5 percent last week. And the Indiana presidents aren’t alone. Lawmakers in several states, including California, Michigan, and Florida, have asked university presidents to justify why tuition increases – many times double-digit percentages – are necessary. The presidents’ response, time and time again, has been to point the finger back at lawmakers… Between the 2007 and the current school year, state support per student for the University of California system dropped an estimated $4,700 per student. In the same time period, net tuition revenue per student only increased an estimated $3,500.

Read full article [here].
by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: October 19th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Tuition at the University of California, Berkeley, was about $700 a year back in the 1970s. Today, U.C. Berkeley students have to fork over around $15,000 per year. That’s a 2,000 percent increase. There’s a simple explanation, according to Sandy Baum, who teaches at George Washington University. “States are paying less of the cost than they used to,” Baum says. She adds that as state budgets shrink, the students’ share of paying for education goes up… Richard Vedder, who runs the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, says the more government aid goes up, the more tuition rises. He says limits on grants and loan subsidies would cap spiraling tuition prices. “That reduces the demand for college, and that is going to tend to reduce the ability of colleges to raise tuition fees,” Vedder says. Many economists question that link. So does Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, who has pushed for more college aid for low-income students. In fact, Duncan and others argue that the problem is that grant aid hasn’t risen fast enough.

Read full article [here].
by Larry Abramson, NPR.

Posted: October 19th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“Just getting rid of Reed would not be a cure-all,” said Max Rosenkrantz, an associate professor of philosophy at Cal State Long Beach. “[But] you have to confront the evil in the form it’s incarnated. He is the personification of larger forces.” The petition, started by Charles Wallis, a CSULB associate professor of philosophy, accuses the chancellor of mismanaging the CSU, and raising pay and benefits for “hand-picked administrators.” It also calls for Gov. Jerry Brown to take action, declaring “any response by the governor’s office, shortof firing Reed and instituting executive pay and wage reforms, represents an endorsement by the governor of Reed’s destructive and selfish mismanagement.” But CSU spokesman Erik Fallis said people should take the petition “with a grain of salt,” citing stalled bargaining between the California Faculty Association and the CSU.

Read full article [here].
by The Editor in Chief, The Daily 49er.

Posted: October 19th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . 1 Comment.

California voters approved Proposition 13 to rein in property taxes that had doubled in 10 years. More than three decades later, that rebellion has mortgaged the state’s future, saddling it with the nation’s highest debt and lowest credit rating. The measure led to reductions that dropped per-student school spending from seventh to 29th nationally, prompted cities to pursue sprawling retail development to compensate for lost revenue and… cut support for its public universities by 18 percent to $4.5 billion this year… Proposition 13 created disparities in tax payments that amaze Larry Stone, the assessor in Santa Clara County, home to Silicon Valley and companies such as Apple Inc. and Intel Corp… The measure also created loopholes that businesses exploit to avoid paying their fair share.

Read full article [here].
by Christopher Palmeri, Bloomberg News.

Posted: October 18th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The Cal State University unveiled, last Thursday, an executive salary comparison list, meant to put “downward pressure” on its presidents’ salaries, but the 23-campus system is still facing criticism on how it pays its executives. Executive compensation at the CSU became a hot bed issue last July, after the university system approved a $400,000 salary for San Diego State University President Elliot Hirshman — a salary that will pay the SDSU executive $100,000 more than his predecessor. “This is a list that justified raises that were already in place,” said Brian Ferguson, a California Faculty Association spokesman. “[It is] creating a means to justify the ends.” Ferguson highlighted the fact that the CSU did not use a neutral third party to create the list, but the 23-campus system insists that this type of third party will be found in feedback from the state’s legislative analyst office and department of finance.

Read full article [here].
by The Editor in Chief, The Daily 49er.

Posted: October 17th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Oh my view of state government hasn’t really changed because I thought it was broken before I took this job and I think it’s broken now. One thing that has changed in this role, though, is my perspective of state legislators. I did a lot of lobbying and advocacy on behalf of students before I got this job and I went on a number of lobby visits with legislators and legislative staff and all of them say, to the last man or woman, “We’re advocates for higher education, we’re champions for higher education, we believe in higher education, we went to a UC, our children go to UC’s, blah blah blah.” And then they turn around and they pass a budget that cuts the UC system $650 million as is the case in this last budget cycle. And it took me some time in this job to realize that we were getting snowed a little bit — that it was just a really, really effective sales job. And that all those people who told me that they were advocates for the UC system, who then would vote for the increased pay for prison guards and then cut the UC by hundreds of millions of dollars, had fooled me a little bit. And I’m not fooled anymore.

Read full article [here].
by Holly Kernan and Jonathan Stein, KALW News.

Posted: October 12th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Yet accurately comparing what the community colleges spend on education-related costs with the CSU system and particularly the UC system is impossible without further transparency, the report said. “Neither segment has ever been willing or forced to disaggregate undergraduate from graduate spending,” the report said. CSU spokesman Michael Uhlenkamp said it’s true that the system does not separate undergraduate education spending as part of its current budget process, but could find a way to do it if lawmakers asked for the data. Yet Steve Boilard, director of higher education for the Legislative Analyst’s Office, said that CSU and UC have been asked to provide that data for years and that it would be informative for policy analysis. “Going back eight or nine years, there’s been a number of questions from our office, (the California Postsecondary Education Commission) and legislative staff trying to disaggregate graduate spending for UC or CSU,” he said. “And continually, the universities have insisted that they are unable to separate those costs out.”

Read full article [here].
by Erica Perez, California Watch.

Posted: October 12th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.