One of the best parts of a California university experience is meeting students from other parts of the state, America and foreign countries. Such beneficial student diversity is threatened by a $3,400 tuition hike for new non-resident students for fall 2025, to $52,536 a year. It was approved Nov. 14 by the Board of Regents.
CalMatters reported the new amount is $2,208 more than the normal supplemental tuition increase for inflation approved by the Regents in 2021. The hikes supposedly are to pay for an expected $500 million UC budget shortfall. California residents will pay $500 more from the 2021 plan, to $14,934, but not anything extra this time.
We’ll have to see how this is addressed in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s budget proposal for fiscal year 2025-26, which will come out on Jan. 10. But last year’s $73 billion budget shortfall was addressed in the enacted budget in part with a $125 million cut from the general fund for UC operating costs.
But the bigger problem is UC still refuses to address its longstanding administrative bloat. This was addressed at the national level in a 2023 study by Paul Weinstein Jr. for the Progressive Policy Institute, “How to Cut Administrative Bloat at U.S. Colleges,” which examined 51 schools nationwide. For our state schools, here are the numbers of students per non-faculty on the list (higher is better): 6.59: UC Santa Barbara; 5.84: UC Irvine; 5.36: UC Davis; 4.99: UC Berkeley; 2.79: UCLA; 0.93: UC San Diego.
If UC Santa Barbara can get by with 1/7th the number of non-faculty as UC San Diego, surely cuts can be made to the latter.
Weinstein noted, at U.S. schools from 2010-18, student services spending rose 29%, administrative costs 19% and instructional spending only 17%. And from 1976 to 2018, the number of students increased 78%, but administrators 164%. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects administrative bloat to grow another 7% over the next decade.
In September, the UC Regents approved spiking President Michael V. Drake’s base pay 25.3% to $1.3 million. Salaries for the chancellors also jumped about 30% on average for the 2024-25 school year to $1.14 million for UC San Diego’s Pradeep Khosla, $978,904 for UCLA’s Julio Frenk, $946,450 plus $220,000 in private funds for UC Berkeley’s Rich Lyons and a paltry $895 million for UC Irvine’s Howard Gillman. By comparison, Gov. Gavin Newsom makes $234,101 and President Joe Biden $400,000.
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Weinstein notes the costs of complying with new state and federal regulations have boosted compliance costs up to 11%. So, cut red tape. Additional federal loans for students, ironically, only went 40% to the students, but 60% for increased “salaries and other expenses.” To correct that, he favors the federal government negotiating tax-supported student loans contingent on lower tuition. And he favors cutting non-faculty positions 1% a year for the next five years.
This should not be a partisan issue. Institutions of higher education exist to help educate and contribute to innovation of all sorts. The more they cater to featherbedding bureaucrats, the less they fulfill their mission.
California should lead the way in making a university education more affordable to all, including foreign exchange students but especially to California residents. Shrinking the number of administrators and superfluous staff is a good start.