THE FUTURE OF THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY
Video and PowerPoints from "UC Davis 101" are available online (scroll down on this "Video of Past Events" page, part of The Future of the Public University website). Or, click on the following links:
Also available online: Video of Professor Gonzalez's recent talk, "Universities Cannot Escape History, But Can They Make It?" — part of the UC Davis Humanities Institute’s ongoing series Conversations in the Humanities.
Read a message from Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi and Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Ralph J. Hexter about The Future of the Public University.
Related: Tuition relief for the middle class?
By Dateline staff
Faculty members from the School of Education brought their expertise to a public forum this week on UC’s financial challenges, in a discussion that included recollections of 19th- and 20th-century UC leaders who overcame obstacles to build and preserve one of the world’s great universities.
The faculty panel addressed fast-rising tuition and the 33-year-old ballot initiative, Proposition 13, which forever changed UC’s financial picture.
Rounding out the “UC Davis 101” panel, the campus’s chief budget officer outlined where UC Davis’ money comes from and where it goes — and warned that preliminary calculations for 2012-13 show yet another shortfall.
About 50 people attended the late afternoon seminar Feb. 7 in 3 Kleiber Hall. This was a one-time seminar — but video is available online for those interested in UC’s struggle to maintain accessibility, affordability and quality in today’s tough economic times.
‘Extraordinarily good leaders’
Cristina Gonzalez, a professor in the School of Education and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, and former dean of Graduate Studies, gave a brief history of the UC system, citing “extraordinarily good leaders at key moments of its development” — presidents who understood the forces of legislative control and popular clamor, and knew when to oppose them and when to tap them to advance the mission of the university.
People like founding President Henry Durant (1870-72) and his successor, Daniel Coit Gilman (1872-75), who fought the forces that sought to make UC more of a vocational school. And Benjamin Ide Wheeler (1899-1919) and Clark Kerr (1958-67), who tapped societal forces in favor of universal access to higher education.
“The most important issue facing the UC leadership at present is whether to oppose forces demanding greater social equality or to tap them to advance the mission of the university,” she said. Recent protests signify the birth of a new progressive era, she added, and such eras are very good for the university:
“I believe that this is not a moment to fight legislative control and popular clamor, but rather to draw upon those forces to advance the mission of the University of California, which is, and always has been, to provide access to the best available education to the people of the Golden State.”
Proposition 13: A ‘third rail’
Professor Thomas Timar, faculty director of the Center for Applied Policy in Education, gave a short primer on Proposition 13, the voter-approved, 1978 initiative that cut property taxes from about 2.6 percent of market value to 1 percent of market value from three years earlier, 1975, and prohibited further taxation based on property value.
Proposition 13 “turned finance on its head,” Timar said, explaining how cities, counties, special districts, schools and community colleges began looking to the state for extra money that they formerly could get from local taxation.
This meant that UC began competing with all those agencies for a piece of the state pie — and the pie had grown smaller, as a result of Proposition 13.
The state has been in decline ever since, Timar said, yet legislators think of Proposition 13 as “sort of a third rail — they won’t touch it, they’re afraid of it.”
An audience member asked about the repercussions of an attempt to repeal Proposition 13.
“That’s a great question, nobody’s tried it,” Timar said. In talks with legislative staff in Sacramento, he said, “The conventional wisdom that you can’t touch Proposition 13, that you can’t change Proposition 13, is just deeply, deeply ingrained.
Tuition keeps climbing
And, so, tuition keeps climbing — 347 percent (adjusted for inflation) over the last two decades, to $11,279 for resident undergraduates — “which explains why many students may be upset about it,” Michal Kurlaender, associate professor of education, citing data from The College Board’s Trends in College Pricing.
And, whereas students paid about 15 percent of the cost of their UC education in 2000-01, today they are paying about 45 percent — and could be paying more than 50 percent next year.
Students are right to pay attention to the Board of Regents, said Kurlaender, noting that the board decides tuition. The earliest the board will take up 2012-13 tuition is March. (The original version of this article incorrectly stated tuition would in fact be on the March agenda.)
“But, really, a lot of the attention should really be (on) pushing the Legislature to really think about their commitment to funding public higher education.”
Efficiencies and new revenue
Associate Vice Chancellor Kelly Ratliff, who leads Budget and Institutional Analysis, said, “By no means is the university relying just on student tuition to address the shortfall.”
The campus has begun an aggressive program of administrative efficiencies (such as the shared service center) and other cost cutting (such as the Strategic Energy Program), and come up with new sources of revenue (expanded summer programs and increased enrollment of nonresident students, for example).
In 2011-12, these efforts netted a savings of $35.6 million (compared with added tuition of $38.7 million, after diverting roughly a third of the new tuition revenue to financial aid). For 2012-13, Ratliff said she estimates an additional $5.5 million in new revenue and $4 million more in efficiencies.
Still, as of right now, the campus is estimating next year’s shortfall at nearly $28 million — to be adjusted after the governor and Legislature agree on a budget, and after the UC regents decide on next year’s tuition.
Then, if there is still a shortfall, departments and units are likely to be looking at a fifth consecutive year of cuts.
Previous cuts, from October 2007 to October 2011, resulted in the elimination of 500 full-time-equivalent positions (faculty and staff, paid with tuition and state general fund money), or about 7 percent of the work force. “Those are real people who are no longer employed,” Ratliff said.
During that same period, undergraduate sections with enrollment of 100 or more climbed 14 percent, while sections with 20 or fewer students dropped 8 percent.
With less state money and growing enrollment, Ratliff said, “something has to give and part of what’s giving are these quality measures.”
Media Resources
Dave Jones, Dateline, 530-752-6556, dljones@ucdavis.edu