Ironic that with most of the other “Public Ivies” the OOS kids have higher stats than the in state kids.
Like most things out here on the Left Coast, we have a total lack of grown ups willing to make any hard decisions when it comes to the allocation of resources. The UC presidents will continue to stick their heads in the sand and refuse to do any real reform to deal with the funding problems and budget shortfalls.
Some would say the UC presidents are dealing with funding problems, and finding the money they need. Since the state legislature won’t give them any money, and it won’t let them find the money through tuition hikes, the UCs are getting the funds they need from OOS students.
Within a relatively short period of time, perhaps 5-10 years, the more important question will be “How do UC grads feel about their education?”, not “How bitter are mom & dad that junior didn’t get in to Cal/UCLA?”. UC grads tend to stay in CA, so the fact that they were OOS when they arrived is irrelevant. The vast majority of UC grads end up happy and satisfied with the campus they attend, even if it wasn’t their first choice. Even gasp UC Merced grads are grateful for their education and will likely support legislation in favor of strengthening the UC in the future.
Well, yeah, since 90%+ are residents to begin with.
Have you seen any data to show that the OOS’ers stay short- or long-term? (I haven’t, but then I haven’t looked either.)
Mom and dad are not only taxpayers & homeowners, but voters. Recent college grads, either instate or OOS, not so much.
Oh, boo-hoo, says this former Californian and Cal grad.
California still has the world’s best public university/college system. If kids don’t get into one UC, they will likely get into another. If they don’t, they can go to stellar community colleges with a transfer guarantee, then graduate with a diploma from a world-class university. No one will even know they didn’t enter as freshmen. And let’s not forget the excellent Cal State system.
Most people in this country do not have such a wealth of options. I live in a state with ONE good flagship, ONE good state college campus, and ONE good technical school. It’s very hard to feel Californians’ pain since my ONE good flagship is 30% California kids, many of them with lower stats than instate kids’.
This is what happens when you consistently vote down taxes, vote in tax-cutting politicians, and generally sneer at the needs of academic institutions. And I say this equally about my state, as I do about California.
I haven’t seen anyone post how much state funding has been cut for the UC’s. I found this information online:
State funding for the UC’s fell from around 50% from of their budget to below 13% from the 80’s to today. Between 2008 and 2012, state funding fell by $900M (27%).
From the outside (non CA resident) looking in, those are massive cuts in funding. Is it really surprising that the UC’s have turned to OOS students as a way to make up for the budget cuts?
Using California’s 2013 budget.
K-12: 21.4%
Higher Education: 6.6%
Public Assistance: 3.9%
Medicare: 25.1%
Corrections: 5%
Transportation: 6%
Other: 31.9% (this includes public health programs, employer contributions to pensions and health benefits, economic development, environmental projects, state police, parks and recreation,)
Going forward, Public Assistance, Medicare and other (pensions) will continue to grow and take larger slices of the budget pie.
Even if you increase taxes, who says the additional funds will go to higher education and not to spiraling Medicare and Pension cost? Or perhaps the additional funding is better spent on K-12 education (or a high speed rail system!). Going back to the 80’s is not an option, as that fiscal landscape no longer exists.
Back in 2009 the Academic Senate at UCSD advocated closure of UCR to help bolster the budget and preserve the “real” flagship campuses. Accepting increasing numbers of OOS students is simply the least odious of the various options for avoiding deeper cuts to programs and infrastructure.
California has at least one place where it can find money: the corrections budget. CA has a well-documented and notorious problem with costly and overcrowded prisons, due in part to the state’s deeply misguided “three strikes” law. There are people who earned life sentences for car theft. The state has also let the prison guards’ union run circles around several governors, to the extent that CA prisons are overstaffed, and prison guards earn better starting salaries than Harvard grads. It’s not unheard-of for some to take home $300,000 a year thanks to very generous overtime.
The corrections budget probably couldn’t be halved, but there’s room to slice it by a lot (though CA might have to commute the life sentences of some true menaces to society, like car thieves and pot-lovers, sentenced under the “three strikes” law. Money that can go to higher education, K-12, high-speed rail, or repairing nearly 3,000 bridges in the state that engineers have deemed structurally unsound.
It would, however, require the Gov. and the state legislature to pick a fight with the prison guards, and cut prison budgets in the face of widespread log-rolling.
If the numbers on the internet are correct, California funds about $3 billion a year to the UC system, compared to a cost of $20 billion from the state for undocumented immigrants.$12 billion alone just on K-12
Wouldn’t that be a good place to start?
Yes. And the legislature could re-direct the bullet train money to the UCs.
I live in California. A lot of the posters are misconstruing what is going on. California has a vibrant economy . California has a budget surplus each year and at the end of this year they will have at least 7 billion dollars for a “rainy day” . The UC system is independent from the state government. It is governed by the UC Regents. This is about Janet Napolitano fighting with the state legislature over money. This is about where are funds going to be spent not that there are not enough funds. The legislature did not give her the funds she wanted so she increased the OOS students.
The reason California has so much money is the people in the state voluntarily increased taxes. Wisconsin and Louisiana could learn a lot from California
Gator88ne Medicare is a federal program not a state program
Onthebubble fyi the majority ethnicity in California is hispanic
Is this happening at the most attractive and selective campuses (like UCLA and UCB)? Or is this talking about UC system-wide.
From the perspective of OOS applicants, those are pretty apples and oranges.
As I understand it, among other things in the recent budget agreement she agreed to freeze in-state tuition for the next few years while raising OOS tuition by up to 8%/yr for the next few years. That sounds like a pretty good deal for residents.
As total cost to attend UCLA and UCB starts to exceed 60k, I think the problem of too many OOS students will start to become self-correcting. Either that or OOS requirements will have to be relaxed even further.
The original three strikes law of 1994 imposed a life sentence of at least 25 years for any felony if one had two priors which were categorized as “serious” or “violent” felonies. This led to situations where older criminals with two “serious” or “violent” felonies were given the life sentence of at least 25 years for petty theft and the like, partly due to interaction with other laws that upgrade petty theft from a misdemeanor to a felony if one has a prior theft-type conviction. More recently, a revision in 2012 changed it so that the third strike had to be a “serious” or “violent” felony, rather than any felony (so that petty theft with prior theft conviction and other lower grade felonies no longer count as a third strike). Prisoners serving a life sentence for a non-“serious” non-“violent” third strike could petition to get their sentence changed.
It is not surprising that “tough on crime” sells easily in the political arena (especially in 1994 after years of the crime wave that was starting to subside but still fresh in people’s memory), and the revision in 2012 took two tries to pass (a prior attempt to revise it similarly did not pass). It is a lot harder to get people to look beyond their base fears of crime and think about being smart on crime.
No surprise, since they can show their union cards to the Ds and talk “tough on crime” to the Rs.
Also, the economy is doing well.
California’s income tax rates are also steeply progressive. While that may be politically attractive to those who lean left politically, it also means that income tax revenues are very volatile relative to ups and downs in the general economy, since the wealthy tend to have more volatile incomes (i.e. capital gains in good times, capital losses in bad times). Of course, politicans of any leaning are unable to save surpluses during good times to help get through bad times, since any surplus will have various entities who had their budgets cut looking for the money back, or someone looking for lower taxes.
Historically, UC tuition has generally remained flat during good economic times, but risen sharply during recessions as state budgets get crunched.
@proudparent26 California has an “operating” surplus. But as of March 2016 California has an unfunded pension liability of over $220 BILLION. That one time billion dollar surplus from last year doesn’t even make a dent in this. And there is no plan in place to deal with this. The UCs are going to need to get used to getting by with little or no support at all from the state. Many other flagships do it.
It’s amazing that California residents carry about 50% more debt per capita than NY residents. Hold on when the next recession hits.
Since California is generally in the top 5 states for state+local tax collections, and California recently raised income taxes, you must be speaking solely about your current state?
@notveryzen your post does not make sense. Future Medicare expenses and social security and most government pension expenses are unfunded. Governments operate on a cash system of accounting not an accrual. Unfunded government pensions have nothing to do with UC funding. On a cash basis California is doing very well. It is all about how California wants to spend their money and at least at this time it is abundant.