In his first remarks at a University of California Board of Regents meeting this morning, Lt. Gov. and Regent Gavin Newsom proposed challenging half a billion dollars in cuts to the UC system proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown. Newsom said the regents shouldn’t automatically accept the cuts and said, "I’m not convinced we’re going to lose that half a billion dollars." … "I sit here bewildered by the state not of only our state but the state of our UC system," Newsom said. "I didn’t come here to fail more efficiently."

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by Jack Chang, The Sacramento Bee.

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

A longshot legal complaint by five students who accused California State University trustees of illegally raising tuition in 2009 is now an official class-action lawsuit on behalf of 200,000 students demanding their money back. At stake is $40 million in refunds for students at a time when CSU is facing at least a $500 million cut in state funding that could bring on layoffs, course reductions and even higher tuition. The lawsuit claims CSU illegally raised tuition for fall 2009 because students had already paid that semester’s bill. That question has yet to be decided.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

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

Introduced on Jan. 6, Assembly Bill 89 is the latest installment in a discourse dating from December, when the executives signed a letter to the UC Office of the President threatening legal action if a 1999 regents proposal to increase pensions of employees making upward of $245,000 was not enacted. The letter sparked responses from Yudof and Russell Gould, chair of the Board of Regents, as well as the 1,453 members of the university community who signed a petition urging the regents to resist the executives’ request. If passed, AB 89 would take effect Jan. 1, 2012 and would put the pension limit of $245,000 in state statute, forcing the university to honor the cap despite the IRS waiver.

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by Nina Brown, The Daily Californian.

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

The truth is, the deterioration of [education] funding predates this horrendous Great Recession. It’s not like things went really great between 1990 and 2007, and then all of a sudden we had this problem. Some of it’s driven by demographics — an aging population of voters [worried about] Social Security and police protection. We have a huge demographic of Hispanic youngsters. It’s no time to trim back and say, well, they’re not our children; well, they are our children, maybe not biologically, but they’re our children. Who’s going to train the nurses, the veterinarians? Who’s going to invent the better solar panels? Who’s going to make sure the crops are safe? Business is not doing this. If we eat our seed corn, to use a Texas analogy, there’s not going to be anything to support these programs. You have to create the basis for long-term prosperity.

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by Patt Morrison interviewing Mark Yudof, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: January 15th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The boost is the first tangible evidence of a new approach, endorsed last fall by UC’s Commission on the Future, to raise revenue by increasing out-of-state enrollment from the current 6 percent. Goals range from 10 percent systemwide, to 20 percent at UC Berkeley, although UC officials say that will take several years to accomplish… Critics say the public university shouldn’t invite carpetbaggers to take the place of qualified residents. But UC officials say that since 2007, state funding has fallen short of covering the cost of all students, and the university has had to absorb the cost of educating them. Those undergraduates, currently 11,000, would be displaced by the nonresidents, UC says.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: January 15th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Higher education, slipping as a state budget priority over the last two decades, will take a big hit in Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed budget. Next year, the University of California will take a 13.3 percent cut in general fund support; the California State University system will take a 12.5 percent cut; and the California Community Colleges system will take a 6.9 percent cut. But Brown isn’t accepting the usual solutions for how the cuts gets done. The UC and CSU systems, he insists in his budget, will not rely on increasing fees and cutting enrollments. He expects them, he says directly in his budget document, to "lower the costs of instruction and administration."

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by The Editors, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: January 15th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The number of students applying to the University of California continued to grow this year despite rising tuition and other fallout from the state’s bleak budget. Applications for the fall of 2011 were up 6.1 percent from last year, figures released this morning by UC show, leading to a record high of 142,235 applications… Much of the growth in freshmen applications was fueled by students from outside California: Applications from other states were up 10.7 percent, and applications from other countries grew by 22.5 percent.

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by Laurel Rosenhall, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: January 14th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The 10-campus system received nearly 11 percent more freshman applications from other states for the fall 2011 term, which starts in August, and 22.5 percent more applications from other countries, according to figures released by UC on Friday. Overall, the university received 6.1 percent more applications than it did for fall 2010. With the university budget suffering the effects of the state’s financial crisis, UC officials have reached out to applicants from outside the state. Nonresidents pay significantly higher tuition than Californians, helping the university cope with budget cuts

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by Matt Krupnick, The Contra Costa Times.

Posted: January 14th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The United States’ educational and research pre-eminence is being undermined, and some of the chief underminers are universities themselves, according to articles this week in Science and Nature magazines. Universities are aggressively seeking federal dollars to build bigger and fancier laboratory facilities, and are not paying an equal amount of attention to teaching and nurturing the students who would fill them, scientists say in the articles. "It’s a Ponzi scheme," said Kenneth G. Mann, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Vermont, whose concerns were described by Nature. "Eventually you’ll have a situation where you’re not even producing the feedstock into the system."

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by Paul Basken, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: January 13th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Another key ingredient was a state that was prepared to invest large sums of money in the system, based on enrolment growth. The UC agreed to grow with California’s population (a commitment it retains) and the state funded the places. "It was this large-scale investment by past state governments – which, of course, we are not seeing now – that really (gave) an ability to recruit quality faculty," notes Douglass. David Hollinger, professor of American history at Berkeley, summarises the move: "It was a commitment to education as a public good – and you needed it in California because we didn’t have the Ivy League institutions – and the willingness of the taxpayers, through their elected representatives, to pay whatever it cost to create a first-class university."

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by Zoe Corbyn, Times Higher Education.

Posted: January 13th, 2011, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.