Students are signing up for fall classes, and on many California State University campuses they’re bumping into new, tighter limits on the number of classes they can take. The policy change is more fallout from last year’s state budget cuts, a 20 percent hit for California’s public universities that prompted CSU to slash course offerings and left students at some schools piled up in hallways unable to find a seat.

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by Laurel Rosenhall, The Sacramento Bee.

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

Overall, California has relatively few public employees per capita compared with other states… if you take out prison employees, the number of state employees per 1,000 Californians has actually decreased in the last 20 years. So there it is. California has a prison problem. Let’s see lawmakers, the governor and candidates running for office tackle that one.

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by The Editors, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: April 19th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The student population has nearly tripled since the creation of the Master Plan – and students are far less college-ready, with many needing remedial classes. Yet the share of the state budget going to universities has fallen from 13.4 percent in 1967 to 5.7 percent this year… Now, caught in the squeeze, students and their families are stuck paying the steep price. UC is predicted to hike fees 15 percent a year for the next two years, then 7 percent annually in subsequent years, on top of this year’s 30 percent rise. The cost to attend San Jose State will likely shoot up 10 percent next year, with 2,500 fewer spots for incoming freshmen.

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by Lisa M. Krieger, The San Jose Mercury News.

Posted: April 18th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

California’s high school seniors faced slightly tougher odds to gain admission to the University of California this year and more than 10,700 of them were offered a spot, sometimes several, on the university’s new and controversial waiting lists, according to statistics released Wednesday. Of the 82,056 California applicants to UC, 71.6% were offered freshman entrance to at least one of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses. That was down from 72.5% last year and 75.4% the year before, reflecting in part cutbacks in enrollment due to state budget reductions, the figures show.

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by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: April 14th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Deep budget cuts to California’s public colleges and universities have caused student fees to skyrocket in recent years, but administrators would have to find another way to make up for declining state funding under a bill moving through the Legislature. The legislation would establish a baseline student fee for the 2011-12 academic year at each of California’s three public higher education systems – the University of California, California State University and the California Community Colleges – and would cap subsequent fee increases at 5 percent a year.

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by Robin Hindery, The San Jose Mercury News.

Posted: April 11th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

On March 4, as thousands of students and faculty across California took to the streets to protest budget cuts and tuition increases across the state’s university system, Ricardo Dominguez, an associate professor of visual arts at the San Diego campus, engineered a demonstration of a different kind. Dominguez arranged for hundreds of students to register for a "virtual sit-in," which involved logging on to the Office of the President portal on the system’s Web site… The stunt has landed the tenured professor in hot water with campus police and the San Diego administration. According to Micha Cardenas, a visual arts lecturer and Dominguez collaborator, the university is investigating Dominguez for orchestrating what is known as a "distributed denial-of-service attack," or DDoS.

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by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed.

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

The Stanford group’s finding does not suggest that California has to come up with half a trillion dollars all at once; pensions are paid slowly over time. But the possibility that the state’s public pension funds are much deeper in the hole than reported could help explain why the required contributions to the funds have been rising every year, contributing to California’s annual budget drama. The finding also raises vexing legal issues, because public debts in California are supposed to be approved by the voters. The voters have, in fact, duly authorized all of the state’s general obligation bonds, but the much larger pension debt is appearing out of nowhere.

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by Mary Williams Walsh
, The New York Times.

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

Research increasingly shows that students from working-class families are being priced out of college — even community college — and that it’s harder to pay their own way without taking on serious amounts of debt. A California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) report found that in 1975, a community college student would have earned well over the amount needed for a year of school, including housing and other expenses, by working a summer job in retail. Today that same student would only be able to scrape together about two-thirds of the needed amount — and that’s assuming every single penny was saved… While the recession has triggered especially hard times, this low point follows a long-term trend of diminishing state funding for education. In 1965, the state general fund provided $15 for every $1 paid in fees by UC or CSU students, according to the CPEC. By 2009

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by Rebecca Bowe, San Francisco Bay Guardian.

Posted: April 6th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

the NYT did the state and its readers a disservice in going after California’s pension fund liabilities. The basic story is that if you assume a 4.14 nominal rate of return on pension fund assets, then the state’s pension liabilities look really really bad. The big question that readers should ask is, so what? There have been few people who have been more critical of assuming exaggerated market returns than me, but 4.14 percent nominal? Anyone want to take a bet that California’s pension funds will do better than this?

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by Dean Baker, Beat the Press.

Posted: April 6th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Stanford

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by The Staff, CalPERS Responds.

Posted: April 6th, 2010, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.