The budget package is the last of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure and the tardiest in modern state history. A public hearing on the $87.5-billion general-fund proposal lasted less than an hour Wednesday, when lawmakers made available only an eight-page outline of their plan and took no public testimony. By legislators’ own calculations, the package would shave less than $9 billion from the deficit by cutting programs and suspending corporate tax breaks. Winners in the otherwise austere budget plan would be the state’s two higher-education systems, the University of California and California State University. Both would receive $200 million to compensate for cuts made last year and enough additional money to fully fund projected enrollment growth.

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by Shane Goldmacher, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: October 7th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Every parent – whether Latino or not, whether documented or not – dreams of their child having the kind of success that this young woman is having. And when they watched Meg Whitman belittle and attack this woman for her success, saying that it was not only undeserved but that it was hurting others, their only reaction would be negative. Whitman’s attack on Brown over the housekeeper issue may have been entertaining television, but it was Whitman’s attack on one of California’s best and brightest that will cost her a lot of votes.

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by by: Robert Cruickshank, Calitics.

Posted: October 3rd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Nearly 90 percent of the $20 billion budget of UC – a public university subject to the Public Records Act – comes from private sources, such as medical center revenue and research grants. Critics have long complained that private foundations on California’s public campuses have been used as a sort of secret checking account, at times allowing officials to spend lavishly and escape public scrutiny. They say the foundations’ books should be as open as the public universities they serve, in part because campuses typically use publicly paid employees to do foundation work. In August, for example, California State University officials admitted they have co-mingled public and private dollars to the extent that they can’t tell the difference and don’t know how much money is involved.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: October 2nd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The for-profit predatory colleges, in their mad dash to suck up as much as they can in Title IV funds, Pell grants, and other government subsidies, thus enriching their investors at the expense of students, prey on and then wolf down the most disadvantaged students they can find. The for-profit predatory colleges sign up as many “borrowers” as they can – even pounding on homeless shelters to recruit bodies, looking for drug addicts they can enroll from recovery programs and all of this with debilitating consequences for borrowers who miss payments and borrowers’ families. They set up at welfare offices, hang out at laundromats in low-income neighborhoods, recruit at public housing units, and their “recruiters” patrol the streets of distressed neighborhoods in automobiles or on foot looking for vulnerable working class bodies they can register for government cash.

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by Danny Weil, Truthout.

Posted: September 23rd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

By collecting the $6.5 billion in unpaid taxes, a sum the Franchise Tax Board estimates California leaves on the table each year, California could raise enough money to wipe out a third of the current shortfall. This year, the money lost to tax cheats would pay the state’s entire share of expenses for the University of California and the California State University systems. Collecting this money doesn’t require raising tax rates, wiping out entire social programs or cutting back on teachers, students and schools.

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by Chris Parker, Capitol Weekly.

Posted: September 23rd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The changes can be traced to 2003, when regents Gerald Parsky, Richard C. Blum, and Paul Wachter – all financiers by trade – took control of UC’s investment strategy… Bypassing the university treasurer’s in-house investment specialists, the regents investment committee hired private managers to handle many of these new kinds of less-regulated transactions. This action theoretically placed some distance between the personal financial holdings of regents and the investments made on behalf of the UC endowment and retirement funds. But it also served to increase management costs, and to limit the transparency around UC’s investments, since these "external" managers are not subject to the same public disclosure laws that apply to university operations. Unfortunately, many of these deals, while potentially lucrative, have lost significant amounts of money for UC’s retirement and endowment funds

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by Peter Byrne, The Berkeley Daily Planet.

Posted: September 21st, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Under U.C.’s proxy voting guidelines, the university is required to review case by case all shareholder resolutions that are "controversial or relate to social issues." But thousands of documents obtained from sources and under a California Public Records Act request by The Bay Citizen show that, over the past two years, Institutional Shareholder Services, a proxy voting service, voted on behalf of U.C. against hundreds of resolutions that appeared to fall within the university’s guidelines.

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by Tess Townsend, The New York Times.

Posted: September 16th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

"We’ve got to change the way we operate if we are to continue being what we are," Judy D. Olian, Anderson’s dean, said in an interview. "State support has declined so significantly that we’ve asked ourselves what is the best model to sustain the excellence of the school and the excellence of what we can do in this region." Some critics say that Olian’s plan, coming after several rounds of UC-wide fee increases, is another step toward privatizing the prestigious public university system. Olian and her supporters deny that, saying that Anderson would remain under UCLA’s academic governance and policies, including its tenure and pension rules.

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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: September 9th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The president of University of California and the chancellor of the California community college system has resigned in protest from the California Chamber of Commerce board of directors after the organization backed Meg Whitman’s bid for governor… The chamber has traditionally stayed out of partisan politics, even though the group is often seen as Republican-friendly.

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by Anthony York, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Since defaulted loans are a net gain to the government and its collection agencies, they have no incentive to moerate school prices. High prices means higher loans. Higher loans means more defaults and more profit for everyone. This has allowed school tuition to rise at twice the rate of inflation and four times the rate of wage growth… So we have a debt larger than all of our credit cards, more toxic than subprime mortgages and a nightmare to recover from. It’s a grim outlook for the next generation of students.

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by Staff, College Scholarships.org.

Posted: September 3rd, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.