Last Thursday, regents hiked salaries by 3 percent for its top-paid executives. The new salaries range from $231,000 to $991,000. In solidarity with a labor-union campaign to boost the minimum wage across the country, regents approved a $15 minimum for all UC employees – including part-time workers and contractors. The net cost: $14 million a year. “The University of California’s mission statement proclaims that one of its fundamental missions is teaching and creating ‘an educated workforce that keeps the California economy competitive,'” noted Assembly Republican Leader Kristin Olsen of Modesto, in a July 22 letter to Napolitano. “How does your decision today help California students achieve this mission?”

Read full article [here].
by Steven Greenhut, Reason Mgazine.

Posted: August 9th, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Fears about an American deficit in science and technical know-how have erupted regularly since World War II, Teitelbaum observes. Often they produce a boom in demand and supply, followed by a bust. Interest in science and engineering courses arose after the 1957 Sputnik launch, which raised public concerns that the Soviet Union’s technical capability was surpassing America’s. By the 1970s, when many of these inspired students were deeply into their doctoral or post-doc careers, they were discovering that demand for their skills had disappeared. An entire generation “had been told that this was a great national emergency, that we needed scientists,” the chairman of MIT’s physics department lamented at the time. “Now they are out on the street and naturally they feel cheated.” California aerospace workers in the 1980s and high-tech engineers after the dot-com collapse in 2000 felt the same dizzying sensation.

Read full article [here].
by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: August 1st, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The shift over the past decade should alarm Californians who consider that UC’s first mission is to serve state residents. In 2005, 95 percent of the enrolled freshmen systemwide were state residents. By 2014, that dropped to 83 percent. At Berkeley, the decline was even sharper, from 92 percent in 2005 to 73 percent in 2014… The governor in his original budget proposal for this fiscal year sought to freeze out-of-state student levels. But the spending plan approved in June did not include that freeze. UC says it plans to keep enrollment of state residents flat for the upcoming year…

Read full article [here].
by The Editorial Board, The Contra Costa Times.

Posted: July 31st, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Aisen resigned in June from UC San Diego, where he had overseen the study since 2007, to become founding director of an Alzheimer’s institute that USC was establishing in the Sorrento Valley neighborhood… In the last year, USC has reached out to at least three life-science institutions in San Diego to explore a purchase, merger or other types of collaboration. None of those inquiries has resulted in a partnership. During an interview this month, USC Provost Michael Quick said his university’s envisioned footprint in San Diego could include free-standing institutes, academic consortia and joint ventures with targeted companies. “The 20th century was dominated by physics. The 21st will be dominated by biomedical sciences,” Quick said. “We have to be at places where the conversations [in life sciences] are the best, and San Diego is one of those places.”

Read full article [here].
by Gary Robbins, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: July 24th, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

White House officials say that pushback from the higher education industry and congressional Republicans did not lead to the retreat. Instead, they say they could not develop a ratings system that worked well enough to help high school seniors, parents and counselors. Ted Mitchell, U.S. undersecretary of education, said attempts to bundle many measurements of colleges’ performance into a single score backfired, making the effort “less transparent.” … Now, the education department is creating a new website that will enable families to research and compare the records and outcomes of colleges and make their own judgments without being offered a composite score. That system is expected to be ready by the fall and will expand on the existing federal College Navigator and the College Scorecard, which together provide statistics on such factors as graduation rate, average debt payments, crime on campus and ethnic enrollment.

Read full article [here].
by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: July 22nd, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

UC Merced, the youngest and smallest of UC’s nine undergraduate campuses, opened in 2005. But its growth has been hampered by the UC system’s financial problems since the recession. The regents were once again sympathetic to Merced’s expansion goals, as they were during a previous discussion in March. Still, several on the board reiterated their concerns about paying for the expansion mainly through bonds and dorm fees, since it’s unlikely the estimated $1 billion needed would be available through direct funding from state taxes. They also said they were concerned about UC Merced’s idea to hire one master developer to oversee the project’s construction. UC Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland said the campus needs to grow to 10,000 students, in part, so the school can gain the necessary revenue to wean itself off subsidies from the UC system that more established colleges do not receive.

Read full article [here].
by Larry Gordon, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: July 21st, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

Here’s the problem: LAO is way too focused on higher ed as it relates to the budget. And so it has argued for limited enrollment growth at CSU and flat enrollment at UC. There’s a wonky word that the LAO folks will understand for their position: it’s nuts. Applications to universities in California and elsewhere are way up. And California needs to produce many more college graduates for itself. And California has a huge interest both in luring college kids from other states and keeping the California kids it has paid to educate. So why limit enrollment? … LAO needs to think about why it is making assumptions that position it as hostile to college access. And then do some serious rethinking on higher ed.

Read full article [here].
by Joe Mathews, Fox and Hounds.

Posted: July 14th, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

“It’s pretty clear that UC’s more confrontational approach didn’t work especially well with this governor,” said Steve D. Boilard, executive director of the Center for California Studies at Cal State Sacramento. “Both UC and CSU managed to get considerably more funding than the governor was originally offering, but UC’s additional funding is largely one-time and restricted to specific purposes, while CSU’s additional funding is largely ongoing and nonrestricted.”

Read full article [here].
by Carla Rivera, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: July 4th, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

The move to part-time adjuncts hasn’t lowered the cost of higher education for students and their families; costs have continued to increase faster than inflation. And the unionizing trend does not seem to have had a role in pushing those prices higher, either – at least, not so far: The percentage of expenses at public and private universities or colleges that goes to instruction (including faculty salaries) has held steady at 32 and 30 percent, respectively, since 2006, according to the American Institutes for Research. “Faculty, unionized or not, will not likely drive the cost of education higher,” says John Barnshaw, senior higher education researcher at AAUP, who noted that the main reason tuition has increased is because of state budget cuts to public universities.

Read full article [here].
by Ryan Derousseau, US News and World Report.

Posted: June 16th, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.

One factor underlying the drain of higher education resources is that for many politicians, the value of higher education is an abstraction. They understand — enough to mouth the words, at least — that an educated and well-trained population is a plus for a competitive state. But they don’t have any idea how much that effort can or should cost or how to measure the benefits of a process that unfolds over years, or decades, or a lifetime. So they hack away at the state university budget and raise tuition, which eats into the effectiveness of the institution and places it more out of the reach of middle- and low-income residents, which makes it look more like an institution for the elite, which leads to more budget cutting…you get the drift.

Read full article [here].
by Michael Hiltzik, The Los Angeles Times.

Posted: June 15th, 2015, by: admin. Categories: . Awaiting Comments.