We have reached a crucial moment in the destruction of California's commitment to affordable quality higher education for its residents. Starting in 2011-12 the UC system will get more of its funds from student tuition than from the State while a higher proportion of out of state than in-state applicants has gained admission to several campuses (including Berkeley and UCLA).
As difficult as the last few years have been, it is clear that the state has crossed a threshold in its disinvestment in higher education and that UC has crossed a threshold in its disengagement with California. Unless reversed, tuition will continue to increase and UC's role in educating Californians will decrease. To make matters worse, fees at both the community colleges and CSU are going up while both systems are being forced to cut back on their number of classes.
Of course, by the logic of the recent auditor's report of UC none of these developments point to any crisis. As Chris pointed out, the Auditor saw fit to classify student tuition as a source of public funding. To make matters worse, they decided to calculate funding on a year to year basis which enabled them to insist that for most of the last 5 years state funding had gone up--while sidestepping the fact that over the period as a whole it had dropped by nearly 10% .(17-18) Remarkably, again as Chris noted, UCOP did not object to these claims--thereby allowing the notion that student tuition was public funding to go unchallenged. (79-86)
The Regents and UCOP will, of course, bemoan all of these developments. But the question remains: will they challenge them?
The history is not encouraging. The inability or refusal of the University's leadership to articulate a defense of higher education as a public good, and its consistently deprecating references to the liberal arts as financial drains have contributed not only to a series of tuition hikes and cutbacks, but it has reinforced a profoundly perverse redefinition of the public. Indeed, President Yudof's long history of suggesting that only grants and donations bring money into the university has contributed to the notion that undergraduate education is a burden on the public.
The University--its faculty, its staff, its students, its resources--is suffering as a result. And so is the future of higher education in the state. Unless, and until, UCOP and the break with their conviction that there is a private solution for a public trust UC will be asking students to pay more for less.
It's time for that faculty strike.
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Chris:
ReplyDeleteThis is (almost) entirely off-topic, but there is one education related issue that has been nagging me and yet it hasn't been much discussed on this blog: the role of schools, and high schools in particular. Obviously you pay attention to the subject as you keep linking to the relevant media sources, yet your tone (if I read it correctly from the short remarks that you supplement your links with) leaves me puzzled:
"*Even* Arne Duncan Thinks Perry is Bad for K-12 Education" (the emphasis is mine, but the word "even" has been added by you). If my memory serves me right, you made another sarcastic comment when you linked to an article about Michelle Rhee and her organization (Students First) attempting to reform K-12 education.
Personally, I see the present state of K-12 education as a big problem, both for the nation's future but also as *our*, higher educators' immediate problem. Isn't it ironic that almost simultaneously with your snide remark concerning Arne Duncan, you also linked to the piece about poor preparedness of high school graduates for college (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/17/scores-show-students-not-ready-college/). Personally, I witness this unpreparedness every time I teach a freshman science class where I need to spend quite a bit of precious time on things like remedial high school Math (and I not even a Math teacher!). And this is not just math/science issue. From what I hear from people in the English department, the writing skills of many incoming freshmen are quite appalling. This situation is bad on so many levels! The issues of competitiveness in the global economy aside, on our “local” UC level we are effectively stuck with yet another unfunded liability. Our Math department offers special remedial classes – a clear drain of limited resources. Our College of Engineering is considering a special “pre-engineering” program to accommodate students lacking sufficient preparation. In my case, the resource drain is less apparent but no less serous: the time I spend on remedial education is the time taken away from the actual course subject matter. Moreover, it shortchanges those students who *are* prepared as I am forced to adjust the level of the class down in order not to lose half the students. And many of the students who enter university unprepared (or under-prepared) drop out without getting their degrees anyway, turning the (unfunded) resources spent on them into a complete waste.
(In fact, one silver lining I see resulting from Berkeley & UCLA aiming at a higher percentage of out-of-state students is that the rest of the UCs may get better prepared in-state freshmen.)
(Continued)
ReplyDeleteNow these unprepared students don't come from the outer space, they come from our high schools. However underfunded these schools may be (and I do not know too much about their current financial situation), I still think that teaching high school Math to even a 40 student class is easier and more productive than teaching it to 250 students in college, particularly when it's just a prerequisite that not even immediately related to the subject. I am willing to bet that my colleagues in the Humanities have similar sentiments concerning students' basic writing skills.
All of this brings me to my main point: I tend to be very sympathetic to people trying to reform the K-12 education system and, particularly, its high school segment. I do support testing and accountability (as long as this testing is meaningful in a sense that its results can be positively correlated with students' future success). Now, I am not an expert, I do not have any solutions to offer and I am not trying to be a back-seat driver here, yet I get to see first hand the results of a system with a high level of dysfunction. So, Chris, I wonder why you tend to sound so sarcastic when you link to any articles mentioning reform attempts.
Just for the record, my own school education was 100% public (albeit overseas); my child is in the CA public school system where, as a parent, I encountered both very good and rather bad teachers, all of them protected by tenure and union rules. Just to be clear, I am not intending my post to be political. I am also neither pro- nor anti-union in general: I can see great societal gains that historically resulted from union activities, yet on the other hand I consider some unions (the Prison Guards' Union anyone?) to be of dubious benefit to the society at large. As far as the much maligned Teachers' Union is concerned, I simply see it as a force that helps maintaining the status quo whose results I find very worrisome.
So my question is: is the Teachers' Union really our natural ally? (After all, we get to mop after them.) Should we be sarcastic about any reform attempts that rub it in the wrong way? I'd love to see some meaningful discussion of that on this blog.
TB--
ReplyDeleteSince both the post and the snark were mine I thought I would respond. My sense is not that we don't need reforms in k-12 education but that both Duncan and Rhee are not it. In fact, what they are pushing is the most market driven, narrow testing, and teacher demonizing approaches possible. Diane Ravitch (no radical she) has written a whole study on the contemporary school reform efforts which does a remarkable job of debunking most of the things that Duncan and Rhee claim (se it at http://www.dianeravitch.com/).
Thanks for the link!
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