Take California Polytechnic State University at San Luis Obispo. In the last 10 years, it has seen the number of applications go up from 31,489 to 54,070, a 53 percent increase. Enrollment is up, but the spots in the first-year class are only up 24 percent during that period. Here’s one way to measure that increase in competitiveness. Last year, for the first time, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo rejected 10,000 applicants with 4.0 grade point averages in high school. That was, by far, the largest number of such applicants to be rejected by the university. In this year’s admissions cycle, the number topped 13,000… Some of the crunch at Cal Poly is due to the state not keeping campuses growing at the same level as the state’s population.

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by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed.

Posted: June 3rd, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“Hundreds if not thousands” of UC employees experienced missed, delayed or miscalculated paychecks as a result of their switch to the UCPath payroll system, according to Kavitha Iyengar, president of the United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents nearly 19,000 student workers in the UC system… “Because there is no penalty for this, UC chose to use its own workers as an interest-free bank as they worked out the system’s glitches,” Iyengar said. “Without accountability measures in place, we have no doubt that UC will continue to take advantage of workers who have no legal recourse.”

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by Andrew Sheeler, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: May 30th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

UCLA plans to flatten enrollment rates over the next four years to address overcrowding and increase graduation rates. UCLA’s undergraduate population has grown by 20% in the last nine years, an increase of over 5,000 students, UCLA spokesperson Ricardo Vazquez said. The university presented a proposal in March to slow down enrollment and increase the undergraduate population by only 1% over the next four years.

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by Megana Sekar, The Daily Bruin.

Posted: May 30th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Academic and Student Affairs Committee: The committee approved a motion to establish a seventh college at UC San Diego. UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla said the current six colleges have already exceeded their designed capacity and their resources are being drained by the rapid growth of the student body… The committee approved a proposal to increase Professional Degree Supplemental Tuition at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ proposed a 9% increase in nonresident PDST per year and a 3% increase in resident PDST per year for the first four years.

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by Genesis Qu, The Daily Bruin.

Posted: May 15th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Ten years ago, the University of California retirees who spent their careers at Lawrence Livermore National Lab sued their former employer over a broken health care promise. After a decade of legal twists and turns, during which thousands of plaintiffs have passed away, the closely-watched case is on the verge of going to trial in Alameda County… lawyers for the University of California say a contract never existed promising lifetime health benefits through the University of California to its employees. In the first phase of this trial, however, a judge ruled in 2015 that the Regents of the University of California did, in fact, intend to create contractual benefits, and implied as much in various brochures and other communications with current and prospective employees.

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by Raj Mathai, Michael Bott, and Jeremy Carroll, NBC Bay Area.

Posted: May 13th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The center adjusted 1979 college tuition and fees for inflation and found the cost of attending a University of California school is six times greater than 40 years ago. A year at UC today costs $14,400, up from an inflation-adjusted $2,200 in 1979. Meanwhile, the cost of attending a California State University campus is 1,360 percent greater than it was in 1979. Back then, students paid an inflation-adjusted $500 for a year at a CSU. Today they pay $7,300. Living expenses are up, too. Students pay $4,000 more per year in food and housing costs, totaling nearly $14,000 per year.

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by Hannah Wiley, The Sacramento Bee.

Posted: May 1st, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

California’s first fully online community college is due to open on Oct. 1, with an ambitious agenda not only to train low-wage workers for better jobs — free of charge — but to find employers to hire them and mentors to give them on-the-job coaching… The college’s state-imposed deadlines are firm, fixed by the same 2018 state law that created it. The rush to meet those deadlines has already led to controversy. Hiles pushed the board to approve a no-bid contract for a friend and politically connected recruiter, whose job is to bring in key executives over two months. Several board members criticized the move. Executive recruiters who spoke to The Chronicle said the timeframe that Hiles has to build her executive team is extremely tight and could place the program’s quality at risk.

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by Nanette Asimov, The San Francisco Chronicle.

Posted: April 28th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Higher education faces an increasingly dire crisis of underfunding. We turn now to look at one of the consequences of this crisis: the growing threat to academic freedom. Academic and author Henry Reichman takes on this threat in a new book, out this week, titled The Future of Academic Freedom. In it, he writes, “Academic capitalism—or, as many term it, ’corporatization’—has greatly impacted academic work and the ability of the faculty to unite in defense of professional norms, including academic freedom,” he says. Academic capitalism is just one of a number of topics Reichman tackles in this book, which starts by asking what academic freedom is, and expands to look at the loss of public funding for institutions of higher education, and the harassment of faculty members for political speech.

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by Henry Reichman, Amy Goodman, Juan González, Democracy Now.

Posted: April 10th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

When states disinvest in higher education, their universities respond by putting a higher priority on students who will bring in the most money. Colleges facing the biggest budget crunches are the likeliest to aggressively recruit wealthy out-of-state students… A few public universities bucked the trend. For example, most of the University of California at Irvine’s public-high-school visits in the Los Angeles metropolitan area were to predominantly minority communities. Only a few visits were in predominantly white communities. But like the University of California at Berkeley and North Carolina State University, which also emphasized in-state recruiting, the reasons may have as much to do with nonresident enrollment caps as with a philosophical commitment to home-grown talent.

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by Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Posted: March 26th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

While the wealthy are spending tens of thousands of dollars making sure their children are accepted to the elite university of their choice, millions of college students are at risk of dropping out because they can’t afford $300 for books… According to a new study, half of California’s community college students don’t have enough food, and 19% are homeless. Several other studies show these challenges are pervasive, both across the country and at 2-year and 4-year colleges alike.

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by Jennifer Tescher, Forbes.

Posted: March 14th, 2019, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.