Alternatives to the Fee Increases

Student Fee increases at UC Unnecessary

By Mike Rotkin, UC-AFT VP for Organizing 

It has been noted that if you say something loud enough and often enough, whether it is true or not, people can be made to think it is true. President Yudof and the Regents have been making wild claims about a UC budget deficit that are simply untrue. The “budget crisis” in the UC system is self-imposed and not based on the rather modest cut the University received in State funding. UC received a roughly 20% cut in the 17% of the UC budget funded by the State of California. When a few additional targeted cuts by the State are thrown in, the total State cut affects only 4.1% of the total UC budget.

As anyone can see on the website of the UC Office of the President (ucop.edu), the University is sitting on over $4billion in unrestricted funds. University officials have tried to claim that these funds are “not really unrestricted,” and that they are not available for covering any University budget shortfalls. But the source of the information about the unrestricted nature of these funds is an officially audited statement. The University’s bond ratings are primarily based on this audited statement, and purchasers of UC bonds depend upon the audited statement of UC’s accounts to be accurate. If these funds are restricted in any way, someone is going to jail! What the UC Administration is really saying is that they have other priorities for these funds, and that, no doubt, is accurate.

UC’s real problem is that it has bad budget priorities. UC provides large bonuses to top administrators while cutting the pay of the faculty and low-wage workers. President Yudof’s salary is almost twice that of his predecessor. UC has a massive new building program despite the fact that they have reduced student enrollments. UC has been raising unprecedented levels of revenue through federal stimulus funding, donations and grants. They have raised more money this year than ever in history and brought in more revenue than ever in the past. What they won’t do, is transfer any money from the University’s donations and profit centers such as the UC hospitals, patents, and federal grant overhead, into the University’s central mission of undergraduate education.

That is why a 4.1% cut from the State of California has turned into a 20% cut across the UC campuses this year. That is why the Regents are now calling for a 32% increase in student fees on top of the 9% increase that they already passed earlier this year. That is why the UC-AFT calls the UC budget crisis “self-imposed.” Nothing in UC’s budget picture requires administrators to make the Draconian cuts that UC is making to undergraduate education (reducing pay to professors, librarians, technical, administrative, and service workers; laying off lectures (who do half of the teaching at UC) in record numbers; defunding childcare services; threatening community serving programs like Community Studies and Latino and Latin American Studies at UCSC; terminating student service programs and particularly those involving recruitment and retention of low-income students and students of color; etc., etc.

But these cuts and the so-called necessity to raise UC student fees to over $13,000 a year are being driven not by the modest State budget cut being faced by UC, but by a set of very bad and misguided priorities from the Regents of the University and the Office of UC President Yudof in Oakland. In fact, the furloughs, lays offs and other budget cuts already made by UC on all of its campuses, have already saved more money than what the University lost to state budget cuts this year.

There are clear alternatives to approving student fees if they reorganize UC’s budget priorities in a rational direction. If UC doesn’t begin to shift some resources from their profit centers and huge reserves, they will effectively price the children of working class families of California, including even upper-middle income families, out of UC and effectively privatize the institution. And the few remaining students who are able to pay the new fees, will be getting a decidedly inferior education when compared with what they received even in the recent past.

UC-AFT has endorsed the following alternative budget saving mechanisms:
1.      Reduce administration costs by $600 million
2.      Short-term borrowing
3.      Share medical profits
4.      Restructure debt
5.      Utilize unrestricted investments
6.      Cut wasteful spending