Today, when many policy preferences are often divided along party lines, there is partisan consensus on this issue: at least 70% of Californians across parties say they would be unwilling to increase student fees to fund higher education. Indeed, less than a third of Californians across all regions and demographic groups say they would be willing to increase student fees. At the same time, a majority of Californians (67%) believe that the current level of state funding for public colleges and universities is inadequate. So what are Californians willing to do to increase funding for public higher education? Overall, they are twice as likely to say they are willing to pay higher taxes as to say they are willing to increase student fees (48% to 23%).
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by Lunna Lopes, PPIC.
Posted: January 26th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California has continued to decrease the budget for higher education across all three higher education sections; the community colleges, CSUs and UCs. The privatization of education, which is the shift of making higher education a societal obligation to one that is funded by students, their families or private funding, has negatively impacted the education outcomes of California students, according to the report… “The $48 fix paper being released today helps chart a path forward, a solution if you will, for our students and for California,” Eagan said.
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by Josselyne Rivas, The Sundial.
Posted: January 25th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
One report, from the Reclaim California Higher Education Coalition, argues for restoring per-student state funding to 2000 levels after adjusting for inflation, for offering all students seats and for eliminating tuition in order to return California to the original spirit of its vaunted Master Plan for Higher Education. Such moves would only cost the median California household $48 per year in additional state income tax, it says… The other report, from College Futures Foundation, says California should change the way it funds its public university systems and makes financial decisions about them. The report notably calls for reform in revenue stability and predictability…
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by Rick Seltzer, Inside Higher Ed.
Posted: January 25th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
The state Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) projects modest growth at California’s two sprawling public university systems over the next seven years and says that UC and CSU won’t need to build new campuses… education officials say those predictions may be undercounting, particularly since Latinos’ high school graduation and college attendance rates appear to be climbing fast. Declines in California high school graduates and college enrollments “have been projected for a long time and haven’t emerged yet,” said Todd Greenspan, the UC system’s director of academic planning. So, he added, “that’s where our skepticism comes in.”
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by Larry Gordon, EdSource.
Posted: January 25th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
David McCleary, a UC Berkeley alumnus and the president of UAW Local 2865 — the union that represents 16,000 UC student workers — attended the panel Tuesday in support of the Reclaim CA Higher Education Coalition’s efforts. McCleary said he sees public higher education as essential to the economy of the state and added that he believes the coalition’s plan for tuition-free campuses is comprehensive and feasible. “(Education) is a public good, paid for with public tax dollars of all the constituents of California, and it needs to reflect those constituencies,” McCleary said.
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by Harini Shyamsundar, The Daily Californian.
Posted: January 25th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Napolitano told regents that the 10-campus system responded to deep state funding cuts during the Great Recession by saving more than $320 million through more efficient energy use, reforms in procurement practices and other changes. Despite such efforts, she said, campuses are struggling with higher student-faculty ratios, fewer courses, fewer teaching assistants and overtaxed student services. “We have done more with less, but at a cost,” she said. The regents will vote on the proposal Thursday… UC has enrolled about 7,400 more California undergraduates since 2015-16 — the largest increase in 70 years — and plans to add 2,500 more this fall. One consequence of the swelling enrollment has been a rise in the student-to-faculty ratio from the historical level of about 18 to 1 to the current 21 to 1, UC officials said.
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by Teresa Watanabe, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: January 25th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Presenting a different perspective on the common misconception that eliminating tuition costs for all California college students would be too costly, a policy paper released Tuesday said that a tuition free college education in California could actually cost taxpayers as little as $48 per year. The policy paper, “The $48 fix: Reclaiming California’s Master Plan for Higher Education,” was facilitated by Reclaim Higher Education Coalition, whose mission is to “reclaim the Donahoe Act of 1960, otherwise known as California’s Master Plan for Higher Education.” As detailed in the plan, California was originally committed to free tuition for all students pursuing an education in California’s community colleges, the 23-campus California State University system or 10-campus University of California system.
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by Alysson Aredas, The Turlock Journal.
Posted: January 24th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
California’s public universities need more stable and predictable funding to accommodate growing enrollments of low-income students and to avoid the “boom-and-bust cycle” that triggers large tuition increases, according to a new report by the College Futures Foundation. Without substantial reforms, the University of California and California State University systems face a troubling future, the study said, akin to global warming: “a slow moving and fundamental change in our economic infrastructure that threatens our civic institutions.” … Modest and predictable tuition increases should be matched with increases in state tax revenues, and higher education funding should no longer be treated as a discretionary budget item by the state, said College Futures.
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by Larry Gordon, EdSource.
Posted: January 24th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Together, the Santa Rosa couple brings in $103,000 annually. That’s too much to qualify for the major financial aid programs but not enough to pay the $34,000 total annual cost of a UC education. The financial pressures may force their daughter Rose to attend community college, despite her 4.66 GPA as a senior at Maria Carrillo High School, her mother said. “I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about this stuff,” Cohen-Sandler said. “I’m constantly calculating, how are we going to make this work?”
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by Teresa Watanabe and Rosanna Xia, The Los Angeles Times.
Posted: January 24th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
Students at elite colleges are even richer than experts realized, according to a new study based on millions of anonymous tax filings and tuition records… Roughly one in four of the richest students attend an elite college – universities that typically cluster toward the top of annual rankings (you can find more on our definition of “elite” at the bottom). In contrast, less than one-half of 1 percent of children from the bottom fifth of American families attend an elite college; less than half attend any college at all.
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by Gregor Aisch, Larry Buchanan, Amanda Cox and Kevin Quealy, The New York Times.
Posted: January 18th, 2017, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.
