preserving quality of uc education
Regents hike student fees
BY AJAY SINGH
UCLA Today Staff
The University of California Board of Regents approved an increase
in tuition fee levels for 2004-05 to help offset a $372.2-million
shortfall in state funding. Beginning this summer, fees for resident
undergraduates will increase 14%, and fees for graduate academic
students 20%. Starting in the fall, students in certain professional
schools will face an average fee hike of about 30%, and annual nonresident
tuition fees will rise 20%.
The regents voted 14 to 2 in their meeting in San Francisco May
20, a day after the board’s finance committee deadlocked 5
to 5 on the issue of increasing student fees. The fee hike is aimed
at preventing deep cuts in state funding from eroding the quality
of UC’s world-class education program.
“The fee increases approved today are significant, and I
know they will have an impact on many families,” UC President
Robert C. Dynes acknowledged shortly after the vote. “We are
striving, to the best of our ability, given the state’s fiscal
crisis, to preserve quality, accessibility and the university’s
contributions to the economy, health and quality of life of California.”
The state is facing an acute budget deficit, making the hike in
student fees virtually unavoidable, UC officials said. And although
the 2004-05 budget is still being negotiated between Gov. Arnold
Schwarzenegger and the State Legislature, “the regents chose
to move ahead with decisions on fees in order to avoid delay in
providing notice of fee levels to students and their families,”
Dynes said.
The regents’ meeting opened with an announcement by Dynes
that last month 16 UC researchers were elected to the National Academy
of Sciences and that as many as 345 of the 1,949 academy members
are affiliated with UC. “Another distinction that came our
way was a study confirming that the University of California is
a national leader in enrolling low-income students,” said
Dynes. He welcomed the selection by the regents May 20 of Gerald
L. Parsky as chair of their board. A member of the board for nearly
a decade and a former assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury Department,
Parsky has long-standing ties to UC. His wife, Robin, is a UCLA
graduate and their daughter, Laura, is a Berkeley graduate.
When Dynes became UC president last October, the university’s
financial situation appeared bleak. “We had three years of
decreasing budgets and there didn’t look to be an end in sight,”
he told the regents. “I looked at the past 20 years of the
history of the university and discovered that when the university
and the governor sat down and worked out a plan for the future,
the university thrived. We expanded our offerings to students, we
aggressively recruited the best faculty and we created new programs.”
UC’s recently announced compact with Schwarzenegger “allows
us to do some recovery on important areas like student-faculty ratios,
faculty and staff salaries and infrastructure and deferred maintenance
— places where we are seriously in trouble right now,”
Dynes said. While the compact promises “more for the future,
it does not give us everything we need. Certainly this year will
continue to be a painful year.”
The fee increases mean that resident undergraduates will pay $700
more, bringing their average annual systemwide fees to $5,684. Graduate
academic students will pay $1,050 more for annual systemwide fees
of $6,269. And students in selected professional schools will pay
anywhere from $2,600 to $4,500 more in fees.
But because campuses also impose additional miscellaneous charges,
the fees for undergraduates will reach an average of $6,230 while
fees for graduate academic students will add up to an average of
$7,893. Still, those amounts are, respectively, about $1,200 and
$2,000 lower than the average fees at four comparable public institutions:
the universities of Illinois, Michigan and Virginia and the State
University of New York.
Under the compact reached with the governor, undergraduate fees
will rise 8% in 2005-06 and 2006-07 to help UC continue its fiscal
recovery. Thereafter, fee increases would be indexed to increases
in per capita personal income, although the regents could implement
fee increases of up to 10% if fiscal circumstances demand them.
Dynes expressed special concern over the increase in professional
school fees. Students of theater, film and television, for example,
will pay $2,600 extra annually while law students will pay $3,800
more. Students of business, medicine and dentistry will pay an additional
$4,500.
“In the future,” said Dynes, “longer-term planning
should give us a better understanding of where professional fee
levels need to be and should help students plan their own budgets
for changing fee levels.”
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