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A Florida education task force established by Governor Rick Scott is recommending that students at the state’s public colleges and universities be charged extra for majoring in subjects that the state considers unattractive for employers.
Under the proposal, state lawmakers would draw up a list of “high-skill, high-wage, high-demand” undergraduate majors, and tuition in those fields would be frozen for three years. If state funding did not replace the revenue lost due to the targeted tuition freeze, colleges would be free to raise tuition in other specific disciplines to make up the gap.
In addition to the STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, the report identified degree programs in “Globalization … Health Professions … Education-critical (math, science) … and Security and Emergency Services” as meeting its criteria for the tuition freeze. According to the report, 37% of Florida’s state university degrees are currently awarded in these fields, which means that any statewide tuition hike would have to be 58% higher to provide equivalent revenue while excluding those students.
The passage of Proposition 30 in California last Tuesday saved the state’s three public higher education systems from devastation, providing funding to forestall huge tuition increases and enrollment cuts. Young voters made the difference in that vote, amounting to nearly a third of the electorate and supporting Prop 30 by a two-to-one margin.
But the struggle over college accessibility in California is far from over, as new proposed fees at Cal State demonstrate.
On Thursday, Cal State administrators unveiled three new fees for CSU students, intended — in the LA Times‘s gloss — “not primarily to generate revenue but to change student behaviors.” But those “student behaviors,” as the Times goes on to make clear, are only even arguably problematic because the system is so badly underfunded.
Here’s what’s up:
First, Cal State wants to charge a $372 per unit (“credit,” for non Californians) to super-seniors who have already taken more than 150-160 units worth of classes. This fee would raise tuition for super-seniors by more than $10,000 a year, bumping in-state students up to the same tuition rate as out-of-staters.
Second, they’re looking to impose a $91 per-unit fee on students who repeat classes, which they estimate is happening at a rate of about 40,000 times a semester, system wide.
And finally, they’re proposing a $182 per-unit fee on courseloads above 18 units. (This would amount to a $3640 surcharge on a 20-unit semester.)
Cal State claims that the practices they’re targeting are clogging up the system — because students are lingering beyond graduation eligibility, retaking favored classes, and overloading their schedules so they can drop courses later, they say, some 18,000 applicants a year are being turned away.
But thanks to budget cuts, students are regularly shut out of courses they need for their majors, and forced to fill up their schedules with electives to maintain financial aid eligibility. Cal State already bans students who have received a grade of C or better in a course from taking it again. And of course many students who sign up for heavy courseloads are doing it not so they can drop classes later, but so they can finish more quickly — in most cases, at least in part, as a way of saving tuition money.
And even if this weren’t the case, the student who changes majors in their senior year, the student who retakes a course to master the material, the student who adds an extra class to have a safety valve if one doesn’t pan out — these students should not be punished. All these “behaviors” are a legitimate, healthy, even commendable part of the college experience.
As the Sacramento Bee editorialized yesterday, this is outrageous. The Cal State trustees have the opportunity to reject these fees when they meet tomorrow.
They should.
Tuesday Update | Well, the trustees didn’t reject the fee proposals, but they’re not adopting them either — at least not yet. According to a statement from the CSU chancellor, the proposals have been removed from the agenda of today’s meeting and will “be reviewed at a later date after Trustees gather additional information and input from stakeholders.”
A student was shot and killed, apparently by police, at a protest against tax hikes and university privatization plans at the Dominican Republic’s largest public university.
William Florian Ramírez, identified in some news reports as Wilfredo or Willy, was a 22-year-old medical student at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, where the protests broke out on Thursday morning. According to witnesses, he was not a participant in the demonstration.
The students were protesting a newly-enacted increase in sales taxes from 16 to 18 percent, as well as plans to privatize the university, which enrolls nearly two hundred thousand students. Activists charge that the nation’s budget deficit is a result of corruption and mismanagement by the ruling Dominican Liberation Party.
Some demonstrators threw rocks at police during the clash, as police fired tear gas and automatic weapons on the crowd. Police say they have video evidence that at least one protester fired a gun at their officers. (Spanish language link.)
One union leader said the fatal shot came from an AK-47, and activists said other students were also injured in the incident. (Spanish-language link. Warning: Graphic images.) A bullet taken from Florian Ramirez’s body has been sent for testing, and police say they are investigating the incident.
Classes at the university have been suspended through Saturday. (Spanish language link.)
On Wednesday, students at Wilberforce University, a small historically black college just outside of Dayton Ohio, gave a demonstration of what student power can mean.
Fed up with the college’s failure to address its longstanding problems, than three hundred of the school’s five hundred enrolled students marched on Wilberforce’s administrative offices to request transfer applications. Some 337 the demonstrators — two thirds of the college’s student body — are said to be prepared to request transfer to nearby Central State University next fall if their demands aren’t met.
The students’ complaints include high tuition, reductions in student services, and unchecked mold in one dormitory.
Founded in 1856, Wilberforce is the oldest private historically black college in the United States. (Many of its earliest students were escaped slaves.) But the college has struggled in recent years, amid charges of mismanagement leveled against top administrators — enrollment has fallen by half in the last seven years, and the institution is tens of millions of dollars in debt.
WU student government president Brandon Harvey, who organized Wednesday’s protest, considers the threat to withdraw a last-ditch effort to save the university. “Academic life, spiritual life and social life are at an all-time low,” he told the Dayton News. “I’m afraid when I come back three to five years from now, Wilberforce University will not be alive.”
Wilberforce president Patricia Lofton Hardaway held a press conference in response to the protest, but made no specific pledges for reform. Students plan to demonstrate again next week when the college’s board of trustees meets at an off-campus location.
Most observers of the American university are intimately familiar with the long-term decline and recent degradation of public higher education in California (if you need a refresher, check out Aaron Bady and Mike Konczal’s excellent overview in the new Dissent magazine). Unless you’re inside CA, however, you may have missed word of the time bomb that’s set to explode there in just eleven days.
California’s government is hobbled by its ballot proposition process, a seemed-like-a-good-idea-at-the-time system by which any state law or constitutional amendment may be put to a statewide popular vote. Though the idea has an undeniable good-government appeal, in practice it rewards Californians with deep pockets and a knack for writing misleading referendum questions — as when a 1964 initiative sponsored by movie theater owners actually banned cable television in the state.
In the last forty years various initiatives have mandated spending on certain budget lines while placing various limits on the state legislature’s ability to raise revenue, squeezing funding for non-mandatory spending and exacerbating the state’s already profound budget problems. This quagmire is one, though certainly not the only, contributing factor behind the defunding of public higher education in the state.
Enter Proposition 30.
Proposition 30 is an attempt to address the state’s education funding gap through two temporary tax increases — a four-year, 0.25% hike in sales taxes and a seven-year bump in income taxes for Californians with annual incomes above $250,000. Revenues raised by the new taxes would be dedicated to public education.
The current California state budget assumes passage of Proposition 30, with various cuts built in should the proposition fail. Though most of the cuts would fall on K-12 education, another $838 million would be shared by the the state’s public colleges and universities, which have already seen $2.5 billion in cuts — and a series of staggeringly high tuition increases — in the last four years.
What does this mean in practice? At the University of California it would mean a 20% tuition hike, in a system where tuition already tops $12,000 a year. At Cal State it would likely mean a 5% tuition hike, the cancellation of a planned tuition rebate, and a reduction of enrollment by some twenty thousand students. Community colleges, which have already turned away half a million students over the last three years, would slash enrollment by another 180,000.
So how is Proposition 30 doing? Not well at all. Support currently stands at 46%, down from 55% a month ago. Voters are skeptical of state government and confused by another similar proposition (if both pass, the one that gets the most votes will go into effect, but significant numbers of voters are planning to vote only for the one they prefer). Additionally, the Los Angeles Times yesterday described Governor Jerry Brown’s campaigning on behalf of Prop 30 so far as “lackluster.”
And if you want to know more about how the state got into this mess, take a look at yesterday’s public statement from UC President Mark Yudof on Proposition 30. “Public higher education in California has been battered by declining State support,” he wrote, and the UC Regents have predicted that without Prop 30, “the ability of the University of California to ensure the high-quality education that Californians have come to expect will be jeopardized.” In that light, he continued, he wanted to make it absolutely “clear that it is neither my official place, nor my personal predilection, to suggest how others should vote.”
Bold words, strong words, from the head of the greatest public higher education system the world has ever known:
“It is neither my official place, nor my personal predilection, to suggest how others should vote.”
This, as TS Eliot wrote, is the way the world ends.
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