The revised budget, commonly known as the May revision, reflects new spending proposals from state legislators, changes in the state’s economic outlook and decreases in federal government funding since the governor’s first proposed budget in January.

The UC Board of Regents will discuss the revised budget at its meeting in Sacramento on Wednesday.

If approved by the Legislature, the governor’s budget will increase funding for each of the state’s higher education systems above the prior year’s funding. The university will receive an increase of up to 20 percent in General Fund appropriations — about $511 million — over the next four years.

According to the budget, these changes will represent an increase of about 10 percent in total operating funds, including tuition and fee revenues.

The budget includes about $25.4 billion in total funding for higher education in the coming fiscal year, $400 million less than was proposed in January.

In addition, a previously proposed unit cap has also been removed from the budget following rejection from the state Legislature. Faculty groups and lawmakers criticized the 150 percent unit cap on state-subsidized courses for its “one-size-fits-all” model and argued that the mandate would not be as effective as individual campus caps.

According to the UC Office of the President, the unit cap would have impacted 2,200 UC students in the 2013-14 academic year.

“UC will continue working with the governor and the Legislature to address critical funding needs,” said Patrick Lenz, the university’s vice president for budget and capital resources, in a statement.

According to the governor’s press release, the budget is expected to remain balanced in the coming years. Spending cuts enacted over the past two years and new temporary funds brought in by Proposition 30, which was passed by voters last November, are expected to allow the state budget to reduce the state’s debt to $4.7 billion by 2017 — a reduction of more than 86 percent.

“This budget builds a solid foundation for California’s future by investing in our schools, continuing to pay down our debts and establishing a prudent reserve,” Brown said in a press release. “But California’s fiscal stability will be short-lived unless we continue to exercise the discipline that got us out of the mess we inherited.”

Additional elements of the revised budget include changes to the state’s public school funding system, investment in job-creation programs and an additional $72 million for county probation departments to compensate for their increased responsibilities as legislatures try to reduce the state’s prison population.

Brown will now have to convince the state Legislature that his plans for higher education and the state merit passage. After discussion from state senators and assembly members, the budget will be finalized in June and take effect July 1, the start of the 2013-14 fiscal year.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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The regents will also review a special report by UC President Mark Yudof on the current and future challenges facing the university, a report on the university’s academic performance and a proposed design for a new aquatics center at the UC Berkeley campus.

On Wednesday morning, the board will hear an update on Brown’s revised budget, which reflects new revenue estimates and the effects of new proposals by the state Legislature on the budget.

Later that day, the Committee on Educational Policy will hear a report on “academic performance indicators” at the University of California. The report summarizes two decades of statistics collected from the 10 UC campuses and finds that despite declining state support, the university has continued to excel by a number of performance indicators, including graduation rates and number of students enrolled.

Over the last two decades, four-year graduation rates have increased substantially. The entering class of 2007 had a graduation rate of 60 percent, up from 37 percent for the entering class of 1992, according to the report.

The report also recommends that state legislators give the university and individual campuses greater flexibility, authority and resources. The positive outcomes seen over the last two decades show that the university can function better independent of the state, the report says.

The committee will also discuss a proposal to increase investment in the university’s Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources for new research that includes work on invasive pests and diseases, childhood obesity and sustainable food projects.

The Committee on Grounds and Buildings will vote on a proposed design for a new aquatics center on the UC Berkeley campus. The $15 million project, which was announced last month, will be funded entirely by Cal Aquatic Legends, an independent nonprofit donor group founded to raise money for the project. The center would only be used for athletic training.

The project requires an amendment to the UC Berkeley 2020 Long Range Development Plan, which the Committee on Grounds and Buildings will be asked to certify and approve.

The Committee on Finance will vote on the 2013-14 financing of Cap-Equip, a universitywide program that aims to restructure capital financing and save money on research, telecommunications and software equipment. The committee will also vote on maintaining the expenditure rate for the university’s endowment pool.

The Committee on Oversight of the Department of Energy Laboratories will hear updates from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on climate research, a new X-ray laser that determines protein structures and a recent grant from the Department of Energy for the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville. In April, the department promised about $25 million annually through 2018 for the development of new biofuels.

On Thursday, after a public comment period, the regents will hold closed meetings with the Committee on Compensation and the Committee on Finance as well as other regents-only meetings.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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The FAFSA she fills out every year does not provide an option for her to report both parents’ incomes, because her parents are of the same sex.

“She is frustrated because she wants to be truthful, but there is no way legally to do that,” said Paul Williams, her brother and the LGBTQ ally cohort leader for the UC Berkeley Gender and Equity Resource center.

In 2014, that will change.

The U.S. Department of Education announced April 29 that the FAFSA, completed by more than 15 million students every year, will begin to collect information about students’ parents regardless of their marital status or gender.

The new form is an attempt to more accurately calculate students’ financial needs and ensure a fairer and more inclusive application process, according to a press release.

“The change will strengthen the integrity of the student aid programs by more accurately capturing a family’s ability to pay for college,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a press conference.

The new form will allow applicants to describe their parents’ marital status as “unmarried and both parents living together” and will use terms like “Parent 1” and “Parent 2” instead of father, mother or step-parent.

Starting in 2014, Anderson will be able to record her biological mother’s income as well as her mother’s partner’s income, which will more accurately reflect her household’s finances. Both of Anderson’s moms are teachers, earning together what Williams estimates is around $105,000. On the old form, Anderson only recorded half of that income.

“She gets a lot of aid now — and she isn’t complaining about that,” said Williams. “But she feels guilty. It’s not as if her parents are unable to pay if they had to.”

According to a report by the Center for American Progress, a nonpartisan educational institute, the current form’s narrow language misallocates financial aid based on sexual orientation or gender identity — characteristics the report says are “completely divorced from an applicant’s actual need for financial aid”.

A major consequence of the old form’s discriminatory language, according to the report’s author, Cal alumnus Crosby Burns, was that it frustrated students with LBGT parents. The language often discouraged students from filing for financial aid, he said.

“There are barriers and delays,” Burns said. “It hurts the student’s ability to get equal access to financial aid for higher education.”

The Department of Education has not yet calculated the effect of introducing these changes to the FAFSA. The amount of financial aid students will receive next year will vary by student, with some receiving more after the change and some receiving less.

Duncan said finances were not a consideration in the department’s changed policy.

“It’s really the right thing to do, and cost savings actually had nothing to do with it because we don’t know whether it will cost more or less,” he said in the press conference.

The announcement comes about a month after the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law that defines marriage as the union between one man and one woman. The DOMA prohibits any federal agency from recognizing any form of same-sex relationships, including marriage, domestic partnerships and civil unions.

According to a joint Washington Post-ABC News poll, about 58 percent of Americans favor legalizing same-sex marriage.

“I think the Department of Education read the tea leaves and saw public acceptance on the rise and realized they should get on the ball sooner rather than later,” Burns said.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, along with eight other Democratic senators, proposed their new plan, SB 69, citing concerns that the governor’s plan fails to tie funding to districts’ performance and ignores low-income students in nonpoor districts.

“We believe strongly in the principle and foundation underlying the Governor’s proposal,” Steinberg said in a press release. “But the Governor’s way leaves poor kids who are in a non-poor district, invisible.”

The governor’s plan, known as the “Local Control Funding formula,” directs additional funds to students with the greatest need — low-income students, English learners and foster youth. But one portion of the plan, known as the “concentration grant,” allocates additional funds to districts in which 50 percent of the student population qualifies as being educationally disadvantaged.

“(Under Brown’s plan) thousands of kids would remain invisible, because if you’re a poor kid in one of those districts that is not in that 50 percent category, you are not getting the concentration grant,” Steinberg said during an education committee hearing.

Steinberg’s proposal aims to provide greater accountability and change the formula for allocating concentration grants, according to a Steinberg spokesperson Rhys Williams.

According to Williams, SB 69 aims to allocate funds more equally across the state by redistributing concentration grants under different formulas. These would distribute funds based on the total number of students in a school or the proportion of disadvantaged students in a school.

The bill also requires more comprehensive data collection and requires districts to demonstrate improved outcomes for student subgroups, while districts that do not show academic improvement could see restrictions on their funding.

But Jonathan Kaplan, a policy analyst at the California Budget Project — a nonpartisan fiscal and education policy group — said Steinberg’s proposal would “water down” the K-12 funding plan. Kaplan noted that the senator’s concern for “forgotten students” could just as easily apply to his bill.

“What happens to students in high concentration of poverty?” he said. “What happens if you spread their funds throughout the state? I would suggest that would be forgetting students who come from areas of high concentration.”

John Deasy, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, said concentration grants are needed because low-income students in highly concentrated districts have unique difficulties.

“When you have students in large concentrations, the social fabric that students of privilege provide — an invisible set of resources — are missing,” he said at a press conference with Brown. “You need more resources.”

Berkeley Unified School District school board member Josh Daniels welcomes both plans, saying he supports any additional funding for the district even though he has not yet analyzed SB 69 specifically.

“The current education funding system is highly irrational and underfunded,” Daniels said. “Anything we can do to increase the funding to address the irrationality would be a positive thing for Berkeley and California.”

Both proposals would increase per pupil funding, according to the Legislative Analyst’s Office.

Although the analyst’s office has not published a report on SB 69 yet, an LAO report on the governor’s restructuring plan agrees that several changes should be made.

“Our research suggests that the qualifications for receiving the concentration grants should be higher — right now, it’s half the districts in the state,” said Rachel Ehlers, an education analyst at the LAO. “If this is supposed to address districts that are facing disproportionately higher challenges, then they should be limited to districts with truly higher concentration of the poorest students.”

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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The California Modernization and Economic Development Act, drafted by UC Berkeley students in January, would implement a 9.5 percent severance tax on oil and natural gas extracted in California and could create anywhere from $2 billion to $2.5 billion in revenue.

The revenue from the oil severance tax would be dedicated to increasing funding for education, the environment, small businesses and county governments, according to UC Berkeley junior and campaign manager for the initiative Harrison Tibbetts.

The initiative expects to provide about $1.2 billion a year for education, with funds being apportioned evenly among the state’s public education systems.

“We have the right to an education,” said ASUC External Affairs Vice President Shahryar Abbasi at the rally. “By passing CMED, we can ensure we have that right.”

ASUC Executive Vice President-elect and current senator Nolan Pack spoke about the initiative at the Earth Day rally and criticized the state’s treatment of vulnerable communities and trends of deregulation.

“Help us repent Reagan’s launch into national politics and reinvigorate California’s economy,” he said.

Pack was among seven senators who helped pass an ASUC bill in support of the CMED initiative in February.

Tibbetts said the oil initiative’s campaign has gained momentum since he initially created the policy proposal earlier this semester.

He said that in the last three months, the campaign has doubled the size of its central team and recruited around 60 volunteers.

“The more people hear about the bill, the more positive feedback we get,” said campaign communications coordinator Kevin Singer.

Additionally, the campaign has received endorsements from high-profile figures, such as 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner and Distinguished Chair in Energy at UC Berkeley Daniel M. Kammen; former U.S. Secretary of Labor and UC Berkeley public policy professor Robert Reich; and state Sen. Noreen Evans, D-Santa Rosa, who proposed a similar bill in February.

Evans’ office endorsed the CMED Act on Friday, shortly after the campaign attended the California Democratic Convention in Sacramento last week.

“If we don’t have revenue, we have cuts,” said Evans’ communications director, Teala Schaff. “We are cutting to the bone and cutting off limbs now. If we don’t identify new revenues, we will see more programs cut.”

ASUC External Affairs Vice President-elect Safeena Mecklai said her office will aid the campaign’s outreach efforts and more directly work toward encouraging students to vote this November, despite the fact that it is not a typically large election year.

“We hope to get students engaged in the issues and use Prop. 30 as a jumping-off point for doing so,” Mecklai said.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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Brown decried Dirks’ $50,000 salary increase over that of Chancellor Robert Birgeneau at a time of fiscal austerity for the university.

The public spat — emblematic of the troubled relationship between the state and university — appeared to set an uneasy tone for the start of Dirks’ tenure.

But when Dirks assumes office on June 1, he may find an unlikely ally in Brown at a time in which state funding has fallen to constitute just above 10 percent of UC Berkeley’s budget.

Dirks and Brown have quickly developed a close friendship. Privately, the two call each other, dine with their wives together and have long conversations about the history of the Indian caste system.

“We like talking to each other,” Dirks said of Brown in a recent interview with The Daily Californian.

Both Brown and Dirks have been called “big-idea” leaders. Both have followed in their fathers’ footsteps and entered public service. Both have spent time studying Asian cultures — Brown having studied Zen Buddhism and Dirks being an expert on Indian history and culture.

“Nick is a very interesting man in himself,” said Peter Awn, dean of the School of General Studies at Columbia University. “Like Brown, he really is an idea man. I think that Brown will get a kick out of that.”

Dirks’ arrival coincides with a critical time for the university in its relationship with the state.

“Nick is a very
interesting man in himself.
Like Brown, he really
is an idea man.” – Peter Awn, Dean
of the School of General Studies
at Columbia University

Both the passage of Proposition 30 and the flurry of new legislation related to higher education being introduced in Sacramento hint at the potential for a reset in recent trends.

For Dirks, Brown represents an opportunity to bridge unstable ties between the university and the state. For Brown, Dirks is a leader who shares his steadfast commitment to cost efficiency as a solution for the university’s problems.

(Sharon Liu/Staff) Sources: Columbia Spectator; Berkeley News Center; LA Times

Tight pockets

At January’s UC Board of Regents meeting, Brown — who has become markedly more involved in the state’s higher education system — called for the university to cut back on what he deemed excessive spending.

The governor voiced the need for limitations on executive pay, student unit caps and a move toward expanding the university’s online program in the name of cost-saving.

“Teaching costs have to be brought down,” Brown said at the meeting. “I won’t tell you how to do that, but you need to figure it out.”

According to Gareth Lacy, a spokesperson for the governor, Brown remains “absolutely committed” to holding the line on tuition hikes.

“Students should not be the default financiers of higher education in California,” Lacy said.

Brown’s recommendation follows his deep cuts to social services, including millions of dollars of reductions to programs such as state child care and college scholarships.

Brown could not be directly reached for comment.

Like Brown — who famously chose to sleep on a bare mattress on the floor of his simple apartment during his first term as governor rather than in the governor’s mansion — Dirks has developed a reputation as an administrator dedicated to cost efficiency even in the face of public concern.

At Columbia, where he served as the executive vice president and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Dirks helped push forward an administrative restructuring of the faculty of arts and sciences. In 2011, the consulting group McKinsey & Company, which was hired by Dirks and Columbia President Lee Bollinger, made recommendations about how to implement this structural streamlining.

“His goal administratively was to increase efficiencies, quicken decisions and to try to build more collaborative relationships among the various deans,” Awn said.

But the program drew significant criticism from both students and administrators. In 2011, the former dean of the undergraduate Columbia College, Michele Moody-Adams, resigned abruptly. Both The New York Times and the Columbia Spectator reported that her decision to step down was related to her concerns regarding the administrative overhaul.

“Dirks is thought of as positive in some ways, but he’s also seen by some undergraduates as someone who is centralizing power and taking it away from individual schools, especially the undergraduate school,” said Jared Odessky, an elected student representative on the Columbia University Senate. “The problem is, when allocating financial resources, a lot has gone to the top.”

Dirks’ management of the program was in part facilitated by the administrative flexibility afforded to him by the private nature of Columbia — a comfort he will no longer benefit from at UC Berkeley.

“One thing I’ll say about University of California is there’s a high level of transparency,” Dirks said. “I’ve never had transparency like this in my life.”

“I’ve never had transparency
like this in my life.”
-Chancellor-designate Nicholas Dirks

While administrators at private schools like Columbia have more maneuvering room, by virtue of being at a public school like UC Berkeley, administrators are required to be more cautious, according to Director of the campus Center for Studies in Higher Education C. Judson King.

“I’m fine with the transparency and the open records, but sometimes it makes it more difficult to make decisions,” said UC President Mark Yudof. “Of course it may be easier to make a decision at somewhere like Harvard than Berkeley, but at the end of the day, we have a public university with a public mission.”

Still, Dirks hopes to spark dialogue with the campus’s active community. He said he plans on holding regular fireside chats and meetings with student groups during his visit to the campus in May.

(UC Berkeley NewsCenter/Courtesy) Dirks shakes hands with Chancellor Birgeneau after being confirmed by the UC Board of Regents in late November of 2012.

“I like that professor Dirks is really engaged with students — he’s very open-minded, intelligent and trustworthy,” said Graduate Assembly President Bahar Navab, who sat on the chancellor search committee.

Creative solutions

Both Dirks and Brown have a history of looking for outside partners to help finance state and university programs.

Recently, Brown secured a deal with a China-based investor to help pay for a $1.5 billion development deal in Oakland. During a trade mission last week in Beijing, Brown also sought support from China for the state’s recently approved high-speed rail project.

As the senior administrator working on the development of global outreach, Dirks was a fundamental force in seeking international support for Columbia, according to Kathy Okun, vice president for university development at Columbia. Under his leadership, the university established five global offices to represent it.

(Joy Lee/China Post/Courtesy) Dirks speaks to students at Doe Library in November of 2012.

“It is critical to engage Berkeley’s global community — and in order to do just that, I recently  completed a tour of Asia, where I met with the Berkeley Clubs in Mumbai, Delhi, Taipei, Hong Kong and Singapore,” Dirks said.

Over the last decade, UC Berkeley has put increased emphasis on garnering private support through different campaigns, initiatives and a shift in alumni relations. Haas School of Business development efforts, such as the thank-you letter event, are among the many programmatic efforts toward closing this gap through a cultural push toward philanthropy, said David Blinder, former associate vice chancellor for university relations.

“Ironically, we need more private money to sustain our public character,” Birgeneau said.

“Ironically, we need more private money
to sustain our public character.”
- Chancellor Robert Birgeneau

In 1987, the state funded 54 percent of the university’s budget. In 2012, the state supplied only 11 percent. Over the last eight years, total yearly private giving has increased by around $80 billion.

Although UC Berkeley still lags behind its private peers, with an endowment about half the size of Columbia’s, the university’s efforts have significantly increased in recent years, said Vice Chancellor of University Relations Scott Biddy.

“We are not simply wringing our hands,” he said. “We are working hard to sustain our excellence … and to ensure that Berkeley competes academically at the very top tier on the global stage — one of the ways we do this is by raising private gifts.”

The new chancellor’s history of engaging with alumni and donor communities comes to the University of California at a time of heightened stakes. His experience as a fundraiser at Columbia may be key in Brown’s advocacy for the university to seek a larger degree of financial independence from the state.

As vice president, dean and primary fundraiser of Columbia’s faculty of the arts and sciences, Dirks raised more than $900 million of the $5 billion Columbia Campaign — the largest campaign in Columbia’s history.

(Chris Taggart/Courtesy) Dirks and his wife, Columbia associate professor of history Janaki Bakhle, pose with Columbia trustee William Campbell.

“In order to have successful philanthropy, you need two things: big ideas and people who make those big ideas happen,” Okun said. Dirks has both, she said.

Like both state and university administrators, Dirks agrees that the university needs to search for new sources of revenue. But he remains reluctant to embrace Brown’s leading proposal that the university take on a more expansive online education program.

In January, Brown proposed a budget that allocated $10 million for the development of online education, calling for the university to take advantage of new forms of technology to improve graduation rates and increase access to the university.

Although Dirks helped create online extension programs at Columbia, he has come down against the use of such programs as a one-stop solution to the university’s financial problems.

“The emphasis of online education should be on enhancing the learning experience, not thinking of it as some great fantasy for revenue production, which is completely untried and untested at this point,” Dirks said.

Looking forward

As both Brown and Dirks move forward, they will have to negotiate what in recent years has been a testy relationship between their two institutions.

“Although the state is only (about) 10 percent of our budget, our relationship with the state is important,” Birgeneau said. “We need to keep it straight.”

Between their shared history of controversial efforts toward fiscal discipline and their search to find more sustainable sources of revenue for the university, the brewing friendship between Dirks and Brown comes at a true inflection point for the university.

“Governor Brown and I are having so much fun talking that we haven’t had the chance to think about the next Prop. 30,” Dirks said. “But we will.”

Contact Alex Berryhill and Shirin Ghaffary at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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University of Chicago economics professor Gary Becker explained the worldwide boom in education, both for rich and poor countries, as well as the rise in women’s education and relative decline in the nation’s competitive edge in public education.

“The message is clear: Stay in school and graduate,” he said.

Due to the empirically proven low risk associated with taking out student loans to pay for college, Becker argued that rising tuition rates do not have as adverse effects as commonly assumed.

“(College students) should pay for most of their education — they will make more than the rest,” Becker said.

At the lecture, Becker emphasized the need to improve students’ ability to repay their loans as well as the need to increase the number of college graduates in the nation. Becker proposed doing so by strengthening family values, increasing high school graduation rates and liberalizing drug laws.

Professor Enrico Moretti, a UC Berkeley labor economist, was the featured lecture respondent. He agreed about the incomparable gains of a college degree but disagreed on several points in Becker’s solution, including Becker’s call to liberalize drug laws.

While such a move may have an indirect positive impact, Moretti said he doubted such a policy’s ability to increase graduation rates.

The lecture was hosted by the department of political science at Sutardja Dai Hall as part of The Baxter Liberty Initiative. The series was established in 2011 by UC Berkeley Foundation trustee Frank Baxter, former CEO of Jefferies & Company and former ambassador to Uruguay.

Becker won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 “for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour,” according to the official website of the Nobel Prize.

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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The social media project, Promise Platform, aims to raise money by encouraging students, faculty members and alumni to start their own UC fundraising campaigns by utilizing their social networks to generate funds and promote the UC system. The program is expected to launch by Oct. 1, 2013.

“A student could promise to dye their hair purple if their friends help them raise $1,000 to support scholarships,” said  Daniel Dooley, UC vice president of external relations. “Steve Wozniak could agree to use a PC instead of a Mac for a month if his friends help him raise $50,000 for the university.”

The regents also heard updates on the Working Smarter initiative, an administrative-efficiency program that has saved more than $200 million and raised more than $89 million in additional funds as of July 2012. The program is ahead of schedule to meet its $500 million goal by 2015.

Additionally, the regents voted to support two housing projects at UC Santa Barbara and an academic building for the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine as well as UC Merced’s design for a new long-term development plan.

Before returning to a closed session, the regents heard presentations from the UC fundraising campaign Onward California and UC Berkeley professor Catherine Cole, who spoke about the Fiat Lux Redux exhibit at UC Berkeley.

In the afternoon, the regents held closed sessions on collective bargaining matters, campus security and pending litigation.

They also discussed developments in appealed court decisions that either involved the UC system or had implications for UC policy. Cases included Felarca et al. v. Birgeneau, a case surrounding the arrest of students attending the Occupy Cal protests of Nov. 9 at UC Berkeley, and Baker et al. v. Katehi, a case relating to the use of high-concentration pepper spray on students by campus police at UC Davis.

The Special Committee to Consider the Selection of a President also met for the third time in a joint closed session with the rest of the regents. The committee discussed selection criteria for the next UC president and its “relationship to potential candidates.”

The Committee on Compliance and Audit met in the last session of the day. Committee members approved the external audit plan for the year ending June 30, 2013, and discussed restructuring of UC debt. On Tuesday, the UC finance office completed a bond repurchase that is expected to save $200 million in future costs.

Contact Alex Berryhill and Jacob Brown at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

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Following Congress’ failure to reach an agreement on a budget deal by March 1, the federal government will face $85 billion in automatic spending reductions. Those spending cuts are expected to continue over the next 10 years, totaling approximately $1.2 trillion in cuts in federal spending.

Among numerous cuts, UC Berkeley will see a reduction in federal support for research grants, financial aid and work-study programs.
Still, the campus remains uncertain about how it will cope with the cuts in funding.

“We need information from federal authorities regarding what to expect on the research side and on the financial aid side,” said UC Berkeley spokesperson Janet Gilmore.

Across California, 9,600 fewer students will receive financial aid this year, according to a statement from the White House.

While the federal Pell Grant program will not be subjected to immediate reductions in funding, it could face deep cuts beginning in the 2014 fiscal year, according to Gilmore. Thirty-five percent of UC Berkeley undergraduates received Pell Grants during the 2011-12 academic year.

Students employed in work-study positions will also bear some of the brunt of the sequester. In California, 3,690 fewer students will receive work-study jobs, according to a statement from the White House.

“I couldn’t imagine putting the entire burden of my loans and room and board on my parents,” said Haley Tessaro, who is employed as a secretary at the Haas School of Business under UC Berkeley’s work-study program.

Additionally, there will be an $86 million reduction in Federal Work-Study and Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants across the nation, according to a statement from Information for Financial Aid Professionals.

“Cal is a great institution, but with lower financial help for students in need, just being a great institution isn’t enough,” Tessaro said.

In the next fiscal year, UC Berkeley’s research programs, 63 percent of which are financed by federal funds, are expected to face $49 million in cuts.

The programs have already incurred $49 million in cuts this past fiscal year, as federal agencies such as the National Institutes of Health have been implementing cuts in research grants since October in anticipation of the sequester.

Federal contracts and grants constitute about 18 percent of campus revenue.

Recognizing that 85 percent of NIH’s funds are allocated to universities across the nation, including UC Berkeley, NIH director Francis Collins said the “impact will be felt across all 50 states.”

Collins said the agency will be penny-pinching, looking for anything that could possibly be delayed as well as cutting travel and conference spending.

“There definitely is a high level of concern, particularly knowing that we have already seen an impact on the research side,” Gilmore said. “We need answers in order to understand what to expect and what students’ financial future looks like.”

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

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If Congress fails to reach a compromise on how to address the national deficit by Friday, the University of California’s prestigious research programs are expected to lose about 10 percent of their federal grants. Currently, the university receives about $3 billion in federal research funds.

The estimated $49 million in research fund reductions from the sequester — described by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., as “next to a major war, economically the worst thing that could happen to this country” — will take place over the course of the upcoming year.

“It means less resources, less money to the lab and personally, it means I will not be taking a graduate student this year,” said professor John Huelsenbeck of the campus department of integrative biology. “It’s the training aspect that concerns me the most. When you don’t have money, you can’t train new researchers.”

Higher education officials across the nation are largely unsure of the specifics of the cuts.

“Education will be badly impacted,” said Jason Furman, principal deputy director of the White House’s National Economic Council, in a press conference. “Across-the-board cuts will affect the priorities that we should be investing in.”

Graham Fleming, UC Berkeley’s vice chancellor for research, said that universities across the country will receive about a thousand fewer federal grants next year if a compromise is not reached.

Many federal agencies have cut back on granting research awards over the past fiscal year in anticipation of the reductions, Fleming said.

He added that the university does not have the funds to fully compensate for the millions in reductions.

“We will just have to do some temporary belt-tightening and hope we can get a more rational and sensible budget plan soon,” he said.

Furman said the cuts were never intended to actually be implemented but rather to serve as a mechanism for motivating Congress to reach a compromise.

Sequestration, approved as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011, was initially scheduled to take effect in January of 2013. The legislation had increased the debt limit, cut $1 trillion in discretionary appropriations and formed a “super committee” in hope of identifying an additional $1.2 trillion in cuts to federal programs over the next seven years.

However, the committee failed to reach an agreement. Now, with the extended deadline provided by the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 just days away, many officials are considering the cuts inevitable.

With little guidance on how to implement the trigger cuts, departments across the University of California have not been able to make definitive plans for the future.

“There is a significant level of uncertainty, and that makes it particularly difficult for researchers to think through their research opportunities,” said Chris Harrington, associate director at the University of California Office of Federal Governmental Relations. “Its not just about the cuts but also about the broader budgetary uncertainty as we look for the future.”

Fleming said he hopes that elected officials realize that the federal government plays an important role in supporting research and development, especially at a university like UC Berkeley. From 2001 to 2011, UC Berkeley graduate students were awarded more National Science Foundation grants than those at any other university in the nation.

About 56 percent of UC Berkeley’s research is funded by federal agencies, Fleming said. He added that the federal government is the only institution that can support research at the scale necessary for competitive innovation. Although private industry does play a role in funding research, it is less willing to invest in long-term projects.

“If we don’t have that support, we won’t have the innovation that has kept the U.S. economy as the leading economy for the last 50 years or so,” Fleming said.

Huelsenbeck said he is already noticing a change in the United States’ ability globally.

One colleague of his, he said, moved to China because of the nation’s increasing investment in science and advanced labs and its ability to fund large amounts of graduate students.

Meanwhile, the United States is cutting back research funds by the millions.

“I can’t imagine a future where across-the-board cuts, without any rhyme or reason, continue in a permanent matter,” Fleming said. “I think this would be temporary  — or, at least, I really hope so.”

Alex Berryhill covers higher education. Contact her at aberryhill@dailycal.org and follow her on Twitter @berryhill93.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that UC Berkeley could receive about 1,000 fewer federal grants as a result of sequestration. In fact, sequestration could mean 1,000 fewer grants to universities nationwide.

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