CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 20, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“UC STILL DECIDING WHO IT WILL BELONG TO”
“UC STILL DECIDING WHO IT WILL BELONG TO”
The question of who the University of
California will be serving when it reaches the third decade of this 21st
Century remains one the elite system’s administrators year after year refuse to
confront.
Will UC and its 10 campuses belong
primarily to the California students they were built to serve? Or will they become
the de facto property of wealthy out-of-state and foreign parents and
governments eager to send their children to what has ranked for 75 years as the
world’s leading public university system?
One
thing for sure, UC today is more dependent than ever on the $24,700 extra each
out-of-state student pays in tuition and fees above what any in-state resident
pays. Another thing for certain: California high school graduates have become
less and less welcome over the last 15 years as the state’s politicians reduced
the flow of tax money to the university.
To maintain academic standards and
retain most of the faculty who have won its 51 Nobel prizes, UC needs big
money. Hence the impulse to replace California tax dollars with out-of-state
and foreign student tuition and fees.
How strong is that impulse today?
Final university enrollment figures for this fall are not yet official, but
last spring, fully 45 percent of admission offers at UC Berkeley went to
non-Californians. Out-of-staters got 42 percent of admission offers from UCLA,
39 percent at UC San Diego and 35 percent at UC Davis, to name some of the
system’s most-desired campuses. It’s not yet certain how many took up those
offers.
But the result is that more and more
California parents and kids are coming to believe that what was supposed to be
their university has gotten beyond reach of most. It’s not just the push for
out-of-state tuition money, but also the increases for in-state tuition and
fees, which tripled in the last 12 years to $9,139 this fall. Costs of
books, room and board are added to that.
Yes, UC offers plenty of scholarships
to California kids, but full rides are rare for anyone who can’t dunk a
basketball or tackle a swift 220-pound running back. So UC today is almost as
expensive for in-state residents as top private colleges were a mere 10 to 15
years ago. Inflation does not account for nearly all of this.
Recall where UC came from: Back in the
early 1960s, the state’s education master plan stipulated that everyone in the
top one-eighth of a California high school class would be offered a slot on at
least one UC campus.
That policy has been tweaked a bit
over the years, but campus officials like to point out that “UC has not reduced
the number of Californians it admits.” True, anyone in the top 9 percent of a
California high school class today will be admitted, but many are offered slots
on low-demand campuses like Riverside and Merced, both smog- and heat-ridden
locales where few out-of-staters want to spend several years. Two years ago,
Merced had just 1.2 per cent non-Californians, Riverside 6.9 percent.
The logic also ends when you consider
there are many more Californians today than earlier, so admitting roughly the
same number as 20 years ago means thousands of excellent, deserving students
will be left out.
The influx of foreign students that’s
a big part of this picture has had other effects, both positive and negative.
It certainly increased diversity on the most popular campuses. But some critics
also say it has helped fuel a documentable rise of corrosive anti-Semitic
incidents and rhetoric on campus, both from students and faculty.
Another effect of high tuition and
out-of-state enrollment is a greater emphasis on attending much-more-economical
community colleges, from which thousands transfer to UC each year.
The bottom line: It’s no wonder that
for many parents of California high schoolers, the biggest worry today is not
drought or home prices or the possible onslaught of floods this winter, but
whether their children will be able to attend the elite universities which once
were a matter of course for the best students.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
No comments:
Post a Comment