Members of the UC Berkeley community were called to action at Tuesday’s forum on social inequality and social opportunity, urged by the panel of speakers to advocate for changes to state legislation that will make education more accessible.
The first of four events in a series called the “Campus Forum on the Future of Public Universities,” centered around the inequities that exist in California’s public education system — lack of consistent quality, lack of cooperation between the community colleges and four-year universities and lack of funding that drives up prices and limits access to students in the lower and middle socioeconomic classes.
The approximately 200 students, faculty and staff members at the forum heard from featured speakers Angela Glover Blackwell, Robert Reich and Peter Schrag, all of whom have expertise in the area of social policy and express interest in improving access to education as a key to closing the gap of wealth in both California and the rest of the United States.
“We’re in a vicious cycle where the wealthy and the upper-middle class have seceded to private institutions, leaving less political support for public goods and services,” said Reich, former secretary of labor under President Bill Clinton and UC Berkeley public policy professor.
According to Schrag, former editor and columnist for the Sacramento Bee and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute for Governmental Studies, California was once the model for the rest of the country, but it is now 46th in the nation in money spent per student, 50th in students per teacher, 49th in students per librarian, 49th in students per counselor and 46th in students per administrator.
While statewide advocacy campaigns like UC for California and campus-based demonstrations have failed to prevent the state’s disinvestment in public higher education — $650 million in cuts have been enacted this year alone — Reich said the public must express its displeasure to the legislators that represent it.
“Regardless of the quality of people you’ve got in government, nothing good happens unless people outside (of government) are mobilized, organized and energized to push the people inside (of government) to do the right thing,” Reich said. “An excellent university like this will not lose its excellence. It’ll lose its economic diversity, and that’s what would be the greatest shame.”
Blackwell, founder and CEO of PolicyLink, said people should organize around the issue of academic equality and not rush out to an occupation like Occupy Wall Street without a specific goal.
“It takes a movement to do what’s right under these circumstances,” Blackwell said. “I want to see us as a nation make sure we’re providing support for low-income students; I want to see universities demonstrate that they’re making that commitment and I also want to see the public rising up and saying, ‘We want to have a fully equal society.’”
Reich presented a radical solution — students would not pay anything while attending school but would pay a percentage of their income after they graduate and begin full-time work — that would ensure all students admitted to the UC could afford it.
Schrag presented a simpler solution.
“People need to find politicians not afraid of using the T-word,” Schrag said. “Tax the rich.”
The forum was sponsored by the Council of Deans, campus Academic Senate, Office of the Vice Chancellor for Administration, Graduate Assembly and Berkeley Staff Assembly.
Comment Policy
Comments should remain on topic, concerning the article or blog post to which they are connected. Brevity is encouraged. Posting under a pseudonym is discouraged, but permitted. The Daily Cal encourages readers to voice their opinions respectfully in regard to the readers, writers and contributors of The Daily Californian. Comments are not pre-moderated, but may be removed if deemed to be in violation of this policy. Click here to read the full comment policy.
Every qualified California student should get a place in University of California system. That’s a desirable
goal for a public university. However, UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau
displaces Californians qualified for education at Cal. with $50,600 tuition Foreigners.
UC tuition increases
exceed the national average rate of increase. The University
of California Board Of Regents
jeopardizes Californians attending higher education by making UC the most
expensive public university in the United States.
Self-serving
tuition increases are used by UC President Mark Yudof to increase the pay of
80,000 eligible faculty and others. Payoffs like these point to higher
operating costs and still higher tuition for Californians. Instate tuition consumes 14% of Ca. Median Family
Income!
I agree that faculty in higher
education and senior management, like Yudof and Birgeneau, should consider the
students’ welfare and put it high on their values.
Deeds unfortunately do not bear
out the students’ welfare values of campus senior management and the UC Board
of Regents.
Opinions to UC Board of Regents,
email [email protected]
Schrag said. “Tax the rich.”
Any forum by the lunatic left boils down to this one demand.
“California …46th in the nation in money spent per student, 50th in students per
teacher, 49th in students per librarian, 49th in students per counselor and 46th in students per administrator.”
The one statistic Schrag failed to mention is that California has the second highest (behind New York) average pay for teachers. If our teachers are already paid so much, does raising taxes to pay them even more make any sense? Put another way, why has California teacher’s union sucked up so much of our education dollars, such that we are near the bottom in spending per student yet near the top at spending per teacher? And wouldn’t our statistics improve a great deal if illegal aliens brought their children back to their home countries?
25 years of SACTO Libs legislature incompetence have turned Cali into a 3rd world state.
Suck it up Libs, the end is near.
As far as spending per pupil, it is the same whether there are 1,000 teachers making $100,000 per year or 1,500 teachers making $66,666 per year.
“According to Schrag, former editor and columnist for
the Sacramento Bee and visiting scholar at UC Berkeley’s Institute for
Governmental Studies, California was once the model for the rest of the
country, but it is now 46th in the nation in money spent per student,
50th in students per teacher, 49th in students per librarian, 49th in
students per counselor and 46th in students per administrator.”
California voters solved this issue in 1994 when Prop 187 amended sections of the State Education Code to deny education to non citizens. It really comes down to implementing the provisions of the State Education Code put in place by voters and then letting its implementation be challenged up to the Supreme Court which will result in the overturning of Plyler v Doe and resolution to the budgetary problems of California and other states overrun with illegals. A correct interpretation of the 14th amendment will rid the state of anchors, once correctly classified as illegals. Once the school system is purged of millions of illegals and anchors, California will be among the leading states in all of these categories.
If “academic equality” is consistent with the rest of the uber-left agenda, then it means redistribution of grades to eliminate the “inequality” between those who are “privileged” and those who are “academically challenged”. Yet more proof that the logical extension of “progressive” thinking is patent lunacy…
Only a year or two ago, UC itself was promoting charging differential tuition for different degree programs based on expected future earnings.
Reich here proposes the logical extension of that idea, and suddenly it’s “radical”.
Politically charged opinion piece masquerading as straight news reporting.
DailyCal wallows in a cesspool of fail.
How come it costs 50% more (after adjusting for inflation)
for University of California Board of Regents Chair Lansing and President Yudof
to provide the same service?
Total expenditures in the UC system in 1999-2000 were $3.2
billion to educate a student population of 154,000. Converted into 2011 dollars
using the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI calculator gets us to $4.3B in 2011
dollars, which comes out to $27,850 per student.
In 2011, the total UC system budget was $6.3 billion
dollars: an increase of almost 50% after adjusting for inflation. Enrollment
also rose – to 158,000 students, a 3% increase, yielding a cost per student of
$39,750.
Costs went up 50% in
10 years. And yet the news out of UC
President Yudof is that the UC system is “bracing” for ‘another round
of budget cuts’!
Email opinions to UC Board of Regents [email protected]