They came to me in the middle of the night. They were young and beautiful and dressed up like they were about to go out. I had about an hour’s warning, and their knock on the door was light so as to wake no one who wasn’t already up. When they got to my doorstep, I was ready. I knew it would be hasty and impromptu, but there’s no reason even a simple wedding can’t be beautiful.

We shared grapes and wine, and I told them that what begins as new and perfect fruit can end up a rich, fermented, much-changed substance that the vine might not recognize. They tasted both and said their vows, and we signed the paperwork. With a little help from their friends, they were married.

In the state of California, any recognized member of the church clergy can marry individuals to one another if the couple has a license. Over the years, I’ve married a handful of couples in the woods and in my living room. I’ve seen the state and the nation struggle over the definition of marriage, and I’ve seen it take many forms. I’ve heard the academic and feminist arguments that marriage was, for many centuries, a primarily economic arrangement to secure the merging and inheritance of property. Much about marriage has changed, but for the very rich and the very poor, the economic part remains the same.

The rich have assets to protect. They draw up contracts and agreements to ensure no one is seduced into a holy and blissful union by a heartless and calculating gold digger.

The poor have other arrangements to make. We are more likely to cohabitate to save money, whether it is appropriate for the relationship or not. In my life, I have known men and women who choose to stay with partners who are abusive or merely unsuited because breaking up means giving up a place to call home.

My friends who were married that night in my living room loved one another and probably would have chosen to marry at some point. The reason they came to me with so little notice, however, was not a pregnancy or a shotgun or even a romantic whim. It was the deadline for FAFSA submissions for the following academic year. Too young to be considered independent from their parents, they were desperate for enough financial aid to transfer to a four-year university. They were the children of vanishing middle class. On paper, their folks could afford to contribute to their tuition, but real life is complicated with gambling addictions and jobs that don’t offer health care.

It wasn’t young love. It wasn’t an impetuous gesture or an adherence to belief. It was a financial decision. Like many decisions forced upon us by poverty, it was a decision that puts the future in jeopardy — no money down, crippling credit terms down the road. The FAFSA considers married students independent and places a student in a wholly separate category for aid. Choosing to marry now to qualify for aid may result in a possibly messy and potentially expensive divorce later, but in the moment, we do what we must. In the meantime, we give one another the gift of an education otherwise out of reach.

Tuition has outpaced the cost of living, outpaced inflation and shows no sign of slowing. People all over are taking drastic measures to afford school, and at the University of California, we are no different. A recent discussion on the cost of housing led some of my classmates to speculate on the appearance of quad dorms with four bunks to a room and the feasibility of (not kidding) camping on the Glade and writing a blog called The Great Outdorms. The idea of getting married for mercenary causes may rankle the romantic soul, but in the scheme of desperation, it seems almost a tame solution.

In my tradition, couples being wed grasp hands and are gently tied together to symbolize their bond. When this couple was tied, I told them to remember that it’s only one hand they’ve given and that the other remains free. True of their marriage, this also became a symbol of their shared commitment to helping one another get through school, support one another’s dreams and be good partners; they were not entirely bound, but they were also not entirely free.

Marriage was never pure. It is sometimes undertaken in the spirit of perfect altruism and true love, but my friends’ practical decision was perfectly in line with the long and fraught history of this evolving institution. They might have given up, waited a few years or taken on crushing loans to move forward with their education. A license to marry costs $97 and takes effect the moment both people say “I do.” They’re responsible to one another and for one another, and they take that seriously. This year, they’ll both graduate from a UC school with their respective bachelor’s degrees.

I now pronounce you educated to the minimum degree necessary to get a decent job.

Meg Elison writes the Monday column on financial issues affecting UC Berkeley students.Contact Meg Elison at melison@dailycal.org.

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Tuition would stay the same at all professional schools except the system’s four nursing programs and four newly created master’s degrees. Discussion on professional school fees for the coming year was postponed in November by Gov. Jerry Brown in the wake of the passage of Proposition 30.

Graduate students in academic programs, however, will not be affected by the fee proposal. Professional programs require supplemental tuition fees that other graduate students in academic programs do not pay. Professional programs include law, medicine and business degrees, and academic programs include studies in English, chemistry and history, among others.

According to UC spokesperson Dianne Klein, supplemental fees make sense because professional schools follow a very different funding model than undergraduate programs do — in large part due to the policy decisions of past state governments.

“Gov. Schwarzenegger, for example, believed that while the state had an obligation to fund undergraduate education, the professional schools should be the responsibility of the individual students,” Klein said in an email. “These were the future high earners—the physicians, lawyers and business people.”

The regents will still be asked to approve a fee increase for university’s nursing programs due to a lack of promised state and federal funding after a ramp-up of the nursing programs. The regents will consider approving new fees for new degree programs. Overall, 800 students will be affected by new charges.

“It isn’t very transparent when (the regents) do any fee increases over the summer when students aren’t on campus,” said Bahar Navab, president of the UC Berkeley Graduate Assembly.

UC Berkeley School of Social Welfare Dean Jeffrey L. Edleson said he is sympathetic to the rising costs of higher education and students’ struggles to pay bills.

“On the other hand, by freezing tuition and PDST increases we are actually cutting the University’s budget each year,” Edleson said in an email. “We simply cannot provide the world’s best public education on a shrinking budget year after year.”

Even if the proposal on professional degree tuition is enacted, it could be changed in as little as a year.

 We concluded that most of the programs can get by for one year on their existing fee levels,” Klein said. “This is not a long-term, sustainable proposition, but it is one we think we can do for a year.”

Contact Nico Correia and Sohan Shah at newsdesk@dailycal.org.

Correction(s):
A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that funds from Proposition 30 and a undergraduate tuition buyout by the state government would be used to freeze tuition for many of UC’s professional degree programs. In fact, these funding sources are not connected to the tuition of the programs.

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The new program aims to reduce the cost of tuition by up to 40 percent for UC and CSU students with family incomes between $100,000 and $150,000 beginning with the 2014-15 school year — this is encouraging for the UC, which has seen rapidly rising tuition costs in the last few years due to lack of state funding.

The program is aimed at middle class families who make above typical financial aid guidelines but who still cannot afford high tuition costs.

The scholarship represents a marked increase in state support for higher education, due in part to Proposition 39, which gathers additional funds by closing a tax loophole for out-of-state corporations. It follows another increase in funding for the UC and CSU thanks to the passage of Prop. 30 last fall, which guarantees an additional $250 million each for UC and CSU in the upcoming school year.

Unlike past iterations of the budget, the passed version does not make the added funds contingent upon education based performance conditions. These conditions would have required individual schools to demonstrate that they were increasing affordability, decreasing average time for students’ to earn a degree, improving completion rates and increasing transfer rates. California lawmakers voted against these conditions when they passed the revised state budget earlier this month, which represents a recognition on their part that the legislature should limit its involvement in higher education’s operational matters.

Still, the new program provides far less aid than the bill that failed last August. The 2012 Middle Class Scholarship Act would have cut UC and CSU fees by 60 percent for middle-class students by closing a different set of tax loopholes.

That bill failed to pass at the last minute  in the Senate after the lawmakers were unable to reach an agreement over proposed revisions to it. It is discouraging that the new plan is less robust than the old one, that it took almost a year for lawmakers to come up with an alternative way to support the middle class and that this program had to be added to the state budget rather than passing as an independent bill.

In the last election, Californians made it clear they are willing to have their taxes increased to support public education. Increasing state support should not stop with the middle class scholarship program, whether that support involves direct funding increases or a plan to alternatively fund public higher education given state and federal budget cuts.

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AB 955 will raise tuition during the community college system’s summer and winter intersessions from $46 per unit to the nonresident rate of $200 per unit for all students, regardless of residency status.

The author of the bill, Assemblymember Das Williams, has said he hopes the bill will shorten the amount of time students spend in school and help decrease the amount of debt they have upon graduating. Proponents of the bill have said it also aims to increase funds for community colleges to create more classes.

But the entire idea of the bill is counterproductive to its ultimate goal. If the objective is to reduce the amount of debt for students — a number of whom are low-income California residents who go to school during shorter sessions like the summer to take the remaining units they might need to graduate — why is the price of the units being raised?

Many California community college students are state residents who take classes at their local junior colleges to gain much-needed credits and eventually move up to the University of California or California State University systems. These same students might also be single parents who work full-time and attend community college because they cannot afford the cost of tuition at a major state university immediately after graduation from high school or any other secondary school.

Raising the unit price also affects current UC or CSU students who might be taking community college classes during the summer or winter break to get prerequisites out of the way before the normal school session starts again.

The problem at community colleges is still a difficult one, as the number of courses offered there has declined by 21 percent since 2008, according to a March 2013 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. Most of the courses offered during the summer or winter term are ones needed to transfer or obtain a degree. The state Assembly needs to come up with a better funding solution that helps reduce student debt without raising the unit price.

Community colleges serve as a stepping stone to attendance at a variety of different colleges, both in-state and out-of-state. By raising the price of units during shorter sessions, we could make the dream many low-income students and California residents have of one day attending a four-year institution impossible.

The state Assembly should have thought this one through.

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Derek Remsburg/Senior Staff

During Robert Birgeneau’s nearly nine years as the chancellor of UC Berkeley, he led the campus as it weathered an unprecedented challenge. While the state slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from the University of California’s budget, he fought to maintain the quality of education at this institution against all odds.  Along the way, he redefined what it means for UC Berkeley to be a public university.

In an interview with The Daily Californian’s Senior Editorial Board last week, Birgeneau recalled an instance when officials at another university referred to “the Berkeley miracle” — essentially, the fact that the campus has been able to avoid deteriorating as state funds diminish. A less skilled chancellor might have succumbed to talk that, in the face of such a steep challenge, the campus needed to sacrifice access in the name of excellence or comprehensive academic rigor for targeted success. Birgeneau held steadfast to the belief that UC Berkeley could remain prominent in all areas, and he was largely successful in that mission. “Now, the state … doesn’t even provide enough money to pay the salary of our teachers,” Birgeneau said in the interview. “In spite of that, Berkeley continues to be one of the top-tier universities in the world.”

A student who arrived at UC Berkeley this year sees a tuition bill exponentially higher than those who entered campus when Birgeneau began his chancellorship in 2004. With state funds now accounting for only about 11 percent of the campus budget, students should hardly be surprised. And though UC systemwide tuition hikes over the years have been deplorable, Birgeneau has done all he can to keep UC Berkeley affordable. He started by getting ahead of the curve. About six years ago, Birgeneau said, he and other administrators realized that state funding was going to be a problem, and they “understood that if we did nothing … Berkeley would not be the institution it is today.”

To fight the threat of rising tuition prices posed to middle-class families, Birgeneau pioneered the creation of the campus’s Middle Class Access Plan in 2011. Touted as the first of its kind for any public university in the country, the innovative financial aid system caps parent contribution at 15 percent of total income for students whose families make between $80,000 and $140,000.  But he was also cognizant of the reality that “there was no silver bullet” to the funding crisis. Accordingly, he oversaw a diverse transformation in the campus’s fundraising model. During his time as chancellor, for example, the Campaign for Berkeley has raised nearly $2.6 billion as of last summer to support faculty chairs, research and scholarships, among other items.

As such efforts progress, Birgeneau has in effect instigated a culture change for UC Berkeley. Despite dwindling public funds, Birgeneau’s leadership has emphasized holding onto the campus’s “public character.” That means the campus continues to strive for economic diversity — which one can find evidence of by noting that 38 percent of UC Berkeley undergraduate students received Pell Grants in the 2010-11 school year, according to U.S. News and World Report. It also means that the faculty and student body on campus are deeply committed to public service, Birgeneau said.

In the spirit of serving the public, Birgeneau has been a tireless advocate for some of the most disadvantaged students. Aside from his trailblazing middle-class financial aid plan, Birgeneau displayed a deep devotion to making UC Berkeley accessible for undocumented students. Not only did he personally pressure the governor to support the California DREAM Act, which allows undocumented students to receive financial aid, but he also presided over the creation of a campus scholarship for undocumented students. And he understands that support for undocumented students is incomplete without immigration reform at the federal level, a cause he will no doubt continue to advance when he ends his chancellorship this summer.

Yet when it comes to general campus climate, while Birgeneau recognizes the friction among some student communities, his mindset is problematic. He accurately pointed out that productive dialogue between students is key to bridging the gap, but he incorrectly framed campus climate as “a student problem, not an administration problem.” He is correct that “climate is about how students interact with each other,” but more proactive administrative support would go a long way. The administration, which does not turn over every year like much of the student leadership, needs to take a more active role in improving campus climate.

Birgeneau has also not been accessible enough to students. Although he did a decent job connecting with specific student leaders, he certainly could have been more accountable to the student body at large. When asked about his relationship with the student government, Birgeneau pointed out that he has fostered close ties with ASUC presidents, but he has not been nearly visible enough in the ASUC Senate in recent years. Incoming chancellor Nicholas Dirks, who arrives at UC Berkeley after serving as an administrator at Columbia University, must be more present in public student spaces on campus.

|Dirks can also learn from Birgeneau’s mismanagement of major campus protests. During two of the most significant demonstrations in recent years — at Wheeler Hall in 2009 and during Occupy Cal in 2011 — Birgeneau came under fire for failing to prevent police use of force against protesters. If Dirks internalizes lessons learned from the uproarious aftermath of those protests, he should be able to avoid similar pitfalls.

However, Dirks’ biggest test, as Birgeneau indicated, will be whether he can continue to protect the public character of UC Berkeley. The campus has done great work under Birgeneau, but threats to balancing access and excellence remain. “We don’t need more great private universities — we need great public universities,” Birgeneau said. “That’s Berkeley’s responsibility … we need to be vigilant to maintain our public character for the indefinite future.” Dirks has big shoes to fill on that front.

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The tax increases in Prop. 30 were approved in the spirit of safeguarding public education funding; however, just months after Prop. 30’s passage, we already see its funds being spent elsewhere. Although the UC and CSU systems were able to avoid a midyear tuition increase, painful tuition hikes still loom in the near future.

Pending legislation in the California State Senate and Assembly, Senate Bill 58 and Assembly Bill 67, would freeze tuition at its current rate for all campuses of the UC, CSU and community college systems for the seven-year lifetime of Prop. 30.

Prop. 30’s hefty 3.45 percent increase in sales tax and establishment of the highest top personal income tax rate in the nation will generate roughly $50 billion over the next seven years. Although Prop. 30 revenues are estimated to reach $6 billion this year alone, Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed fiscal year 2014 budget includes just $2.7 billion in additional funding for public education. (Only $125 million of that amount will go to the UC system).

If less than half of Prop. 30 revenue is being spent on public education this year, where is the rest of money going?

Because Prop. 30 did not include a statutory requirement or guarantee that the additional revenues would be committed to public education, it’s difficult to know exactly where Prop. 30 revenue goes. We do know that Brown’s initial budget proposal included a $1.3 billion increase in wage and benefits for California public employees.

Californians voted to keep education affordable for students, not to give public employees a pay raise.

In an op-ed I wrote for The Daily Californian last October, I expressed my concern that exactly this would happen. Based on the vague language of Prop. 30, the fear tactics used to pass it and legislative precedent in Sacramento, several critics had no confidence that Prop. 30 funds would be fully committed to public education.

While I, along with many others, opposed Prop. 30 on the November ballot, we can all agree that now that we have these additional tax revenues, we must do everything we can to hold Sacramento accountable and to commit Prop. 30 money to public education in California.

One ‘Yes on 30’ television ad featured California State Controller John Chiang claiming, “With strict accountability, money must go to the classrooms and can’t be touched by Sacramento politicians.” There currently exists no such accountability.

By knocking on doors, making phone calls and registering tens of thousands of new voters, student leaders fought to secure additional tax revenue for public education from Prop. 30. Is this where students’ efforts are supposed to stop? Get Prop. 30 passed and let Sacramento politicians do the rest? Last November, students demonstrated that their actions can make a difference — but what we decide to do with our voices now can have an even greater impact on the future of public higher education in California.

Fortunately, there exists a proposal in the California State Legislature that would hold politicians in Sacramento accountable and further commit Prop. 30 funds to public education.

The UC, CSU, and community college tuition freeze proposed by Republicans addresses the two critical weaknesses in Prop. 30: 1) Currently, there is no way to ensure these new tax revenues are being spent on public education; and 2) even if the state budget committed 100 percent of Prop. 30 funds to education, issues like excessive executive salary compensation and risky Wall Street investments very well may receive this money rather than students.

AB 67 and SB 58 simply remove tuition hikes as an option to bail out poor budgeting in Sacramento or financial mismanagement by the UC, CSU and community college administrations. With this new law, legislators would have to finally get serious about finding sustainable ways to keep public higher education affordable and accessible to all Californians.

Remember that tuition at the UC and CSU systems has more than tripled over the past 10 years. Where do we expect tuition to be another 10 years from now?
Because students worked so hard to get Prop. 30 passed, it is now our responsibility to hold Sacramento accountable with these new funds, and supporting this seven-year tuition freeze is a first step that would have immediate positive effects on every student in California.

Shawn Lewis is vice chair of the California College Republicans and former president of the Berkeley College Republicans.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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Students have been paying the $60 surcharge since 2007 in order to fund years-old lawsuits. About 10 years ago, the UC Board of Regents inappropriately raised existing fees, prompting two separate court challenges. Both cases were decided in favor of the students, and the university is financing the resulting multimillion-dollar costs associated with the suit through the surcharge.

As terrible as it is to have students fund the fallout of a tuition hike that never should have been instituted in the first place, critics of extending the fee have not presented the university with another course of action that could actually work. So it is understandable that the regents voted last week to extend the surcharge through the 2017-18 academic year.

Without the extended surcharge, students still would have paid for the lawsuit in another fashion. And imagining what that might mean paints a decidedly less agreeable picture: more cuts to services or curtailed academic programs or perhaps even more limited research. It would have been much worse for the regents to further degrade the quality of a UC education because of their administrative mistake.

However, that does not mean the regents are off the hook. They were clearly out of line when they raised fees at the last minute — students were right to hold them accountable for the egregious error. Even taking into account that the university was in a moment of crisis, the regents’ decision is inexcusable. The
surcharge should not exist because the tuition should have never been charged.

While the surcharge extension seems necessary in the university’s current economic climate, the regents should re-evaluate the situation in future years. In the unlikely circumstance that the university finds itself on more sound financial footing, it should explore every option possible for paying the costs associated with the lawsuits early and through other means aside from the surcharge. If the regents can terminate the surcharge early, then they should.

It is too easy to obsess over the narrative that the regents are unapologetically forcing fees onto the students. Students understandably want to believe that there is some other source of money that could be used, but no such option seems to exist.

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Gregory Arena/Staff

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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An estimated 2,000 people converged on the state Capitol, rallying and lobbying state legislators to address student needs. As opposed to the raucous 2012 events, which saw a much larger turnout and involved the arrest of around 70 demonstrators after they occupied the Capitol building, this year, students were able to focus more on their message without the distraction of out-of-hand protests. They applied the kind of political pressure to which state officials are most likely to be receptive.

In that sense, the day was a necessary reminder that students cannot became too complacent because of Proposition 30’s success — there are still reasons to protest. Now that the UC and CSU systems have avoided immediate peril, it would be easy for students to be satisfied, as the threat of a steep tuition hike and sharp cuts to services is no longer imminent. But the students who went to Sacramento, including many UC Berkeley student leaders, rightfully recognize that there is more work to be done.

First and foremost, Prop. 30 does nothing to solve the university’s long-term financial instability, as its tax increases are only temporary. There is no guarantee that tuition will not continue to skyrocket down the road. As they did on Monday, students must continue to let their state representatives know that the university needs big ideas to restore its financial health. Furthermore, some of Sacramento’s plans for the UC system, like imposing unit caps to shorten the time it takes for students to graduate, are worrisome. The more state officials hear students’ concerns, the more likely we are to see change.

Yet Monday also showed that student activists need to work on making their message more specific in the post-Prop. 30 period. There is no large threat to rally against, no widespread Occupy movement to tap into and no proposition to campaign for. Reinvestment in higher education is too broad of an idea — students need to focus on organizing around clearer policy proposals.
Refining the message of the student movement should also encourage more people to get involved. In the future, honing in on targeted policy measures will allow the movement to increase student participation. Individual campuses could get more involved, putting together phone banks or similar events in tandem with Sacramento demonstrations.

While demonstrators can do a better job furthering their goals through more specific measures, their overall message is spot-on: Problems remain with the state’s approach to public higher education. The battle is far from over.

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Graham Haught/Staff

Editor’s Note: This is a general op-ed sent from the White House to address a college audience.

In my State of the Union address, I laid out ways Democrats and Republicans can work together to reignite the true engine of America’s economic growth — a rising, thriving middle class.

We should ask ourselves three questions every day: How do we bring good jobs to America?  How do we equip people with the skills those jobs require?  And how do we make sure hard work leads to a decent living?

Strengthening the middle class requires making America a magnet for new jobs and manufacturing and rewarding hard work with wages that allow families to raise their children and get ahead.  But it also means recognizing that the surest path into the middle class will always be a good education.

As college students, you’re already well on your way.  The education you’re getting right now is the single best investment you can make in yourselves and your future, and it will put you in the best position to get a good job and build a great life for yourselves and your families.  Now it’s up to us to help keep the cost of that investment within reach and to give even more Americans the opportunity to earn the education and skills that a high-tech economy requires.

We should start in the earliest years by offering high-quality preschool to every child in America, because we know kids in programs like these do better throughout their academic lives.  And we should redesign America’s high schools to better prepare students with the real-world skills that employers are looking for right now.

But the truth is, most young people will need some type of higher education.  It’s a simple fact: The more education you have, the more likely you are to have a job and work your way into the middle class.  And that means we have to do more to make sure skyrocketing costs don’t price you and your families out of a college degree, or saddle you with mountains of debt.

Already, my administration has worked to make college more affordable for millions of students and families through a mix of tax credits, grants and loans that go further than before.  But we also need to do something about the rising cost of college.

Over the last two decades, tuition and fees at the average college have more than doubled, and right now, students who take out loans end up leaving college owing more than $26,000.  That much debt can force you to pass over valuable opportunities that don’t pay as well — like working for a nonprofit or joining an organization like the Peace Corps.  And it can mean putting off big decisions like when to buy your first house or start a family of your own.

That’s why colleges also need to do their part to lower costs.  And we need to make sure they do, because the taxpayers can’t keep subsidizing the rising costs of higher education.

Already, I’ve called on Congress to consider value, affordability and other factors when it decides how much federal student aid a college should get.  And we released a new “College Scorecard” that lets students and their parents compare schools based on simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.

As a nation, our future ultimately depends on equipping students like you with the skills and education a 21st-century economy demands.  If you have the opportunity to reach your potential and go as far as your talent and hard work will take you, that doesn’t just mean a higher-paying job or a shot at a middle-class life — it means a stronger economy for us all.  Because if your generation prospers, we all prosper. And I’m counting on you to help us write the next great chapter in our American story.

Barack Obama is the 44th president of the United States.

Contact the opinion desk at opinion@dailycal.org.

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