As the University of California faces huge demand for seats — and public outcry over massive rejections by top campuses in a record application year — state lawmakers are considering a plan to slash the share of out-of-state and international students to make room for more local residents. The state Senate has unveiled a proposal to reduce the proportion of nonresident incoming freshmen to 10% from the current systemwide average of 19% over the next decade beginning in 2022 and compensate UC for the lost income from higher out-of-state tuition.

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by Teresa Watanabe, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: May 25th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

an average annual increase of a bit more than 3¼ percent does not qualify as “the largest state investment in UC history.” It doesn’t justify the “huge budget boost” trumpet blast in this LA Times headline, or the statement cosigned by UC president Drake and board chair Peréz. There are other commitments, all one time, where the main money goes to 2 things: workforce preparedness and student housing… Newsom and Biden see higher education as workforce training for economic growth. They also tie that mainly to community colleges rather than to four-year degrees. Newsom bundles his two biggest one-time programs into an aggregate with a largish headline number that must be shared by the 3 segments, and which treats the segments and their students as the same. Newsom is joining Biden in demoting four-year colleges, which is an anti-progressive trend that universities will need to fight.

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by Chris Newfield, Remaking the University.

Posted: May 24th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

According to the Washington Post, President Joe Biden will not include any student loan cancellation in his annual budget. While the annual budget, which is expected at the end of next week, only contains major policy plans that have already been released by the Biden administration, it’s another major setback for student loan cancellation… It’s not that Biden doesn’t support student loan cancellation; he does. However, Biden wants Congress — not the president — to enact student loan cancellation through legislation.

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by Zack Friedman, Forbes.

Posted: May 21st, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The University of California Board of Regents convened on May 13 to discuss a new multiyear tuition and financial aid plan that would increase tuition for students enrolling in UC schools beginning in 2022… The plan was originally proposed at the Regents’ March 2020 meeting but was tabled until the May 13, 2021 meeting due to the pandemic. The Regents will vote on this plan in their upcoming July meeting.

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by Sindhu Ananthavel, The Daily Nexus.

Posted: May 19th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The entire University of California system will now refuse even to consider SAT and ACT scores submitted, a dramatic escalation from other top colleges which had merely allowed applicants to opt-out of taking them. The system cited the supposed racism of these tests. In practice, the departure from specialized tests on the part of the College Board and the entire abandonment of generically standardized tests by colleges will exacerbate the inequality of our college admissions processes. The most privileged students will always have parents ready to dress their resumes with plum internships and volunteering positions and schools keen on grade inflation. In contrast, the nation’s poorest students — especially those in schools with no funding for AP exams and with parents who rely on them for extra income — must rely on standardized testing as an objective measure of their merit to those wealthy charlatans who hide behind letters of recommendation and nonprofit gigs.

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by Tiana Lowe, The Washington Examiner.

Posted: May 18th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The University of California again is weighing a plan for annual tuition increases across the system’s nine undergraduate campuses, an idea that is drawing criticism from student leaders and some members of the university’s Board of Regents. UC leaders say they need the extra funding from tuition increases because their revenue streams have not kept pace with the university’s undergraduate enrollment growth. But critics say shifting the burden to students to cover those costs is the wrong solution, especially given the state’s budget surplus and the financial hardships brought on by the coronavirus pandemic. The proposal, brought to the Board of Regents as a discussion item Thursday, would go into effect for freshmen entering the university in fall 2022.

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by Michael Burke, EdSource.

Posted: May 14th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Prestigious and predominantly white universities secure disproportionate shares of research grant money, philanthropic donations, full-tuition-paying national and international students, and corporate sponsorships that compensate for diminished support from state legislatures. In a perverse way, these advantages get translated into supposedly objective measures of quality in college rankings, like that of U.S. News, further helping those institutions draw affluent, advantaged students. This trend has left less prestigious public universities that provide the most accessible postsecondary opportunities with weaker private revenue streams, even while they educate the neediest students.

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by Laura Hamilton and Kelly Nielsen, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: March 2nd, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

In a regents’ committee meeting on January 20th, UCOP officials summarized the governor’s budget in a few slides. The 3 percent base increase is on the new, permanently-reduced amount. The rest are line-items that normally a public university would fund out of general operating money… DM [Deferred maintenance] gets $175m in one-time funds, and more earmarks are added. The DM figure is about 1.25 percent of a reasonable estimate of system-wide deferred maintenance, so at this rate UC will fix this year’s back log about 80 years from now. Except it’s not annual money… In short, Newsom restores Jerry Brown austerity in the form of frozen tuition and sub-inflation net state funding. We all hate the phrase, but this is classic “do more with less”–with no state interest in its effect on UC viability.

Read full article [here].
by Chris Newfield, Remaking The University.

Posted: January 25th, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Right now, over 43 million people in the United States are buried under $1.5 trillion dollars in federal student loan debt, including 6.3 million borrowers ages 50-64 and nearly a million borrowers over the age of 65 who may still be paying for a loved one’s education or for their own… We are calling on President Biden and Vice President Harris to immediately cancel up to $50,000 in federal student loan debt. The U.S. Department of Education holds that debt and can cancel it, too. This is exactly what Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should direct their Education secretary to do.

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by Sens. Chuck Schumer and Elizabeth Warren, CNBC.

Posted: January 22nd, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

As a new federal administration begins to take shape under President Joe Biden, a growing list of University of California-affiliated alumni and faculty have been nominated or appointed to positions in the new government… Public service is one of the three core elements of UC’s mission, and these former UC faculty and alumni manifest this mission at its highest level. Here are a few of the nominations and appointments so far — just a snapshot as new staffers continue to join the administration.

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by staff, UC Newsroom.

Posted: January 22nd, 2021, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.