No one is championing it. Again you are imagining things.
But you have not offered any suggestions about how to deal with the budget issues as listed in #717 that are the root of the issue. If the defunding trend continues (which it probably will next recession), choices between several undesirable things will be made.
Federal data show that 90 percent of the school’s freshmen were in-state students in 2004. By 2014, the share had fallen to 69 percent…
These are just facts.
The budget issues are facts too.
But decreased raw numbers of CA students on the UCB campus is not the only answer to the crisis.
Interestingly, Chancellor Dirks seems to think there are some other potential solutions…
Among the steps Dirks outlined were:
Evaluating the university workforce and staffing levels, seeking to reduce administrative overlap
Improving support for teaching and research
Expanding fundraising capacity and alumni outreach
Raising revenue through use of the Berkeley “brand,” land and other assets
Working with the Academic Senate and others to redesign academic units, with the possibility that some could be strengthened, some narrowed to a special focus and others merged or rearranged
Expanding online offerings and extension courses, as well as professional and other master’s degree programs that earn revenue
Scrutinizing the widening gap between athletics revenue and expenses. Dirks said the school is pursuing “major opportunities to increase revenues and donor support for scholarships” and looking to cut expenses.
Again, it is simply hypocritical for students and families how have had the privilege of attending the flagship UC schools to then aggressively posit there is no other solution than to decrease resident student numbers in favor of nonresident admits when there are other possible options available.
That’s just a simple definition easily found in the dictionary.
Once again, you are ranting and insulting instead of listening. No one is claiming what you are claiming others are claiming.
Also, Dirks’ steps may not be enough, or meet with political resistance:
I.e. Dirks’ steps are not exactly a pot of easy money. If successful, they can help, but it is far from a guarantee that they will solve the budget problems. And some of them could be seen as compromising the educational experience.
@ucbalumnus is saying I’m “ranting and insulting” a personal attack lol.
I mean, everyone knows what hypocritical means and everyone can decide for themselves.
Yes there is “political resistance to get through.” At every turn of this issue.
It’s a state run institution and partially a state budget issue, so yeah, it’s “political.”
So you agree we should try to restore the UCB and UCLA resident student and nonresident enrollment levels to pre-2008 as much and as quickly as financially possible?
Awesome.
Now we just need to figure out the fastest way there.
It’s so nice to be on the same page.
What realistic suggestions do you have to improve the financial situation?
I.e. not wishful thinking ones like somehow convincing non-residents to pay non-resident list price for UCR and UCM (or even WUE-discounted price for UCM) when you yourself do not consider UCR and UCM to be desirable enough at resident prices.
Does anyone know why they added Merced as a school instead of just increasing the size of the existing universities? They had to have known that the San Joaquin Valley is as appealing as an Appalachian asthma attack and the smart kids from the area want to be anyplace else anyway.
UCB:
The easy solution is to raise tuition for everyone xx dollars and then continue to use 1/3 of that new amount for financial aid, keeping UC tuition free under the Blue & Gold plan. That would be win-win for those complaining about income inequality since it would essentially be a tuition increase and a tuition ‘tax’ on the full payors to support the lower income students. Of course, that would also require some leadership to fully essplain how it works.
“Does anyone know why they added Merced as a school instead of just increasing the size of the existing universities?”
Merced was picked for the site of the 10th UC for political reasons. Politicians from the central valley had complained for years that the UCs were concentrated in the elitist coastal cities and the salt-of-the-earth San Joaquin valley folks were left with short shrift. Bowing to political pressure, the UC and the legislature eventually agreed to put in a campus. But why Merced was chosen over other cities in the central valley, I have no idea.
@ucbalumnus Really? Ok. So here we go again. To save everyone here huge text blocks I’ll break up the ideas and try to mostly use links.
I want to start with the Riverside, Santa Cruz, Merced argument. The absurdity of your argument regarding those campuses almost goes without saying, especially for Riverside and SC but I guess I have to address it.
Riverside received 4500 nonresident applications. Santa Cruz 5700. Both have strongly increasing nonresident attendance trend lines. http://admitguide.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/UC_SIR_Trends2009-2014.pdf
Santa Cruz has gone from 110 in 2009 to 750 in 2014, Riverside from 95 to 227 (OOS in particular rose sharply). There is no reason those trend lines would not continue upward. Merced can obviously do better. It started with the same number of nonresidents as UCSC in 2009 and has had erratic SIR results since. But those three together could easily continue to grow at a similar pace.
Your maligning of Riverside in particular is confusing, uninformed and undeserved. Riverside is now ranked 121 by US News. Tied with Arizona. Higher than many better known universities like University of Ohio, Howard, Washington State. Arizona has nearly as high a tuition: 33,000 and in 2013 had 3800 international student. Drexel, ranked about 100, has 2000 international students and charges 48,000. There are many other examples of similarly ranked schools with more international students. And even compared to some some similar tuition, but higher-ranked schools like Michigan State (tied for 75) there are some obvious aspects to Riverside that some international students might prefer.
Riverside is an hour from LA. 30 mins from Claremont McKenna, 1 hour from Newport Beach. It is a well respected research university. I really think you drastically underestimate how popular that campus is going to become.
Now, how many international students it SHOULD take is another question. At some point you get to big issues about displacing locals since it is such a big commuter school. But the idea that it “can’t” drastically increase its nonresident population I think is clearly naive.
Santa Cruz speaks for itself. It will have to cap nonresidents soon. It is going to become very popular even faster.
Merced will be slower work, but as the other two become more popular, it will rise on the same tide.
I will also redirect you to Chancellor’s Dirk’s points. You seem to disagree with your Chancellor, which is your right, bu the seems to think they will help.
I’ll get to the audit’s 21 points in another post. Something to look forward to! Gtg.
To expand on #727, some of the other campuses are also surrounded by NIMBY types who oppose expansion for various reasons. As to why Merced was chosen over other San Joaquin Valley locations, probably because of cheap land and not being in the same city as an existing CSU (like Fresno).
Again putting words in other people’s mouth. Indeed, it seems that the maligning of UCR and UCM comes from a different direction, when you yourself are focused on the “top six” UCs as being the only “desirable” ones.
“As to why Merced was chosen over other San Joaquin Valley locations, probably because of cheap land and not being in the same city as an existing CSU (like Fresno).”
In that case I would have picked Modesto - if it had been up to me.
http://articles.latimes.com/1995-04-29/news/mn-60207_1_central-valley is an old article indicating that the two other finalist sites for what would become UC Merced were in Fresno County (Clovis) and Madera County.
@califdad2020 - the link you referenced shows very low numbers of OOS students at the three campuses you use as examples (Santa Cruz, Riverside, Merced).
When you start with such low, low numbers (like 17 students at Santa Cruz and Merced), the addition of a few dozen more looks deceptively impressive. But even in 2014, the “height” of the rising trend you reference, international students totaled only 400+ at Santa Cruz, 200+ at Riverside and a grand total of 9 at Merced. What’s more, the growth trend is not smooth – there are a number of years when the numbers plummet.
The enrollees of domestic OOS is even smaller.
I see the appeal of shifting OOS enrollment to the lower-tier UC campuses. But this idea is simply wishful thinking. There is no evidence that internationals and domestic OOS are chomping at the bit to go to these schools. On the contrary, the link you referenced underscores the lack of OOS appeal at lower-tier UCs. Reducing OOS enrollment at UCLA and Cal is not going to grow enrollment at Riverside or Merced.
This is a very logical approach. Clearly, it is mostly about budget issues. Seems like a billion dollars a year would solve the problem nicely 
Now, I’ll stipulate that legally the CA government can do whatever it wants to the UC system. For all I know, tomorrow the voters will decide to convert UCLA into the Rocco Globbo school for typewriter maintenance. But I think it’s important to focus on practical solutions that balance the priorities that @ucbalumnus mentioned.
I’ll focus on Berkeley since it’s the most prestigious campus, plus it doesn’t have a medical school which makes comparisons easier. Also, most of the angst seems to be about Berkeley/UCLA.
I.) First off, here are the numbers I found -
The 9400 figure for nonresidents counts graduate students too. Fall 2015, undergrads breakdown 20,754 CA resident, 3406 OOS, 3336 International. That’s about 12% OOS and 12% International.
In the mid 2000s, about 3800 CA residents were enrolled as freshman. In Fall 2014-2016, about 3900 CA residents enrolled as freshman – pretty much the same. It was only in the 4 years 2010-2013 that the number enrolled dipped to 3050.
It looks like Berkeley added a bunch of seats in the freshman class since 2012. Perhaps they used the extra nonresident tuition money to expand the class? If this is the case, then the number of seats for CA residents at Berkeley isn’t really being affected now.
(BTW, it is misleading to just count OOS admits. You should count enrollments. This is because the yield on OOS Berkeley admits is quite a bit lower than for CA residents, so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. OOS undergrad admits disproportionately reject Berkeley because they get admitted to better places or because they decide nonresident tuition isn’t worth it.)
Graduate students are trickier. The reports show 15% OOS and 23% Intl, but that’s really misleading. My guess would be over 70% were OOS / Intl before enrolling (being older and independent, they often quickly establish CA residency).
II) It seems like people think CA residents are “owed” almost all the admissions slots at Berkeley because the state appropriates it money. But a few reality checks are in order before feeling too entitled …
a) It’s true that Berkeley received about $430 million from the state (330 in educational appropriations plus 100 in grants and contracts etc.). However, it’s also true UCB received about $470 million from the Federal government (mainly research grants, but also for financial aid). So Federal support exceeds state support.
Suppose taxpayers in the other 49 states got as frantic as some of the posters here. Why on earth should they be contributing more to Berkeley than CA taxpayers and only get a measly 16% of the freshman class seats last year, and basically 0% of the 2200 transfer admits? They might decide that this is ridiculous, and threaten to cutoff Federal funding until 50% of the seats are reserved for OOS taxpayers. And trust me, if Federal research funding were cutoff then Berkeley’s prestige would plummet.
If you ask me, 12% OOS enrolled undergrads at Berkeley isn’t that big a deal when you look at the $470 million in Federal revenue UCB gets. However, Intl students haven’t paid Federal or state taxes, so perhaps it makes sense to reduce the 12% Intl enrollment?
b) What does the $330 million in CA appropriations “purchase”? Seems to me like the state has “bought” two things from the UC system: An estimated decrease of about $11,000 in tuition for every CA resident undergraduate, plus some financial aid for CA students who can’t afford the tuition / cost of attendance.
In other words, the state has just bought tuition discounts for CA families (generally for upper-middle class families, of course). Assuming these rough estimates, why does UC “owe” seats to CA residents since they are returning full value back to CA in the form of discounts?
c) I’d also be careful with saying that seats should be reserved for CA students because of the money their families pay in state taxes. There are many CA residents who pay little in taxes or who receive more in benefits than they pay. Should admissions slots be allocated on the basis of someone’s tax bill? Speaking personally, my company has offices in CA, and my share of the taxes we pay CA is as much as what is paid by most CA taxpayers. Why should my children be treated any worse than a CA resident? People also say that Californians “built” the UC system. That might have been true in 1860 or even 1960, but over the past 25 years the taxpayers of CA haven’t contributed their “fair share”. So people whose families weren’t paying CA taxes back in 1960 don’t seem to have the moral high ground to me.
d) One last thing. In many states (most recently Wisconsin) many people were outraged when politicians like Walker tried to interfere with the operations and independence of the University. Here, we too have politicians challenging the independent decisions of the UC system in order to curry favor with their voters. Seems to me that UC is trying to respond to a challenging state funding problem in a logical way. Odd that the same people aren’t trying to “protect” it from political interference.
III.) I also wouldn’t get so worked up about how standards were lowered for OOS residents (as the thread title implies). The complaint seems to be that about 19% of the OOS students were “unqualified” because they had test scores that fell below the median of admitted residents. That’s a very funny definition of “unqualified”. By that standard, maybe half the California residents should be booted out of Berkeley too?
For the most recent group of freshman admits -
Lastly, Berkeley is one of the world’s great research universities. CA can do whatever it wants, but it seems like with all the choices in the UC and CSU systems they could choose to focus more on maintaining the quality of their leading flagship instead of just on the % of residents who get Berkeley degrees.
To me, this means admitting the best students UCB can from the entire US (but favoring CA residents a lot). Can you imagine schools like Harvard or Stanford tying their hands and admitting mostly from a single state? I don’t think they’d be the schools that they are today.
In fact, Stanford is a great case study. 50 years ago, they weren’t as preeminent as Berkeley. But over last few decades, Stanford has soared. There was no reason that Berkeley couldn’t have done what Stanford did (they’re almost as close to Silicon Valley). I think CA missed a big opportunity.
That’s an interesting article about UC Merced. From a branding perspective, it might have been better to stick with the original plan to call it UC San Joaquin. I think it sounds better and the San Joaquin Valley is a term that is probably more well known to non Californians than the city of Merced. But what do I know. I do wonder why they changed their minds on the naming of the 10th UC?
@al2simon I learned a lot from your thoughtful post. Thank you.
“admitting the best students UCB can from the entire US (but favoring CA residents a lot)”
This is probably the best approach to achieve long term pre eminence, which I would assume most Californians would support. UCB is one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It is no surprise that it would want to accept the best and brightest from all over.
With all due respect, it really doesn’t matter how/why you might get “worked up”. The California Master Plan for Higher Ed is a written – and approved – document, and it clearly says that OOS’ers cannot have lower standards.
I would suggest that most really don’t care about grad admissions.
Graduate programs purposefully draw students from other universities and, by extension, other states. We should probably leave out grad admissions out of this discussion. It’s a whole other can of beans.
@al2simon except many state schools receive federal research grant money, including Michigan, UVA, Penn State etc. etc. And many get more than UCB.
For instance, for state schools in 2012 Wisconsin got 594 million in Federal r+d grant money, UCSD got 637 million. Pitt got 662 million. UMich 820 million. UWash 949 million. All more than UCB. So first you would want to net out that money before you go “allocating” those funds for seats. (And once you adjust them to per capita numbers… oh boy!) I guess all OOS kids go first to UWash, then next UMich. Pitt, then UCSD and then Wisconsin?
And, of course, CA taxpayers have been paying into the UC system for years, and for years have supported the UCs at a higher rate than they have for the past 10 years. Very few people move to CA the 4 or 5 years before their kids go to school. Most have been paying for 20 - 30 years. Some multi-generational families have been paying for many more years than that.
The idea that because a low income family has not paid taxes they should not “get a seat” is as silly as the idea a low income family can’t drive the 5 because they don’t have to pay taxes or can’t call the fire department because they haven’t paid taxes.
We have struck a social contract in CA that we agree to a progressive tax system that allows those with lower incomes to not pay taxes under a certain threshold. (The UCs also give financial aid.) We even voted to agree to tax higher income families at a temporary higher rate. The good folks of CA have agreed to this system (at least through conventional democratic means).
You certainly don’t suggest that CA taxpayers pay to support their UC system and get nothing in return? Of course you don’t. It is well accepted that the CA taxpayers get something for their taxes. You think it should be the 14,000 tuition. But I believe we also had another social contract in regard the UCs, and it was in place until 2007 and it involved a generally agreed on number of about 10-12% of UCB students, for instance, being nonresidents. There is quite a bit of literature, I’ve discovered, that mentions this level.
It was the change, in 2007, that rewarded campuses by letting them keep their nonresident tuition that led to the rapid rise in nonresident enrollment - and led to a net drop, from 07 to 14 of a few thousand resident students at Berkeley and UCLA.
Again, Berkeley resident undergrad enrollment, according to the UC’s own data, went from 22485 in 2007 to 20754 in 2014 (and actually hit a low of 19855 in 2013.) That is a net enrollment loss of 1451, but it does not account for students per year not enrolled. If you look at it year by year, assuming 2007’s 5528 domestic freshman enrolled as a baseline then there were actually 2439 less CA freshman enrolled at UCB undergrad in that time period than there would have been had the 5528 number been kept constant.
And again, in the same time period nonresidents enrolled increased from 2151 in 07 to 6742 in 2014.
I think the UCs have an obligation to minimize the damage to CA students. And I don’t believe they have honestly tried to do that as well as they could.