Obama wants academics to be priority
By Editorial Board
Sept. 30, 2010 12:05 a.m.
Cut costs more intelligently, the president said.
On Monday, Barack Obama held a teleconference with student journalists to make a case for his higher education agenda.
The Daily Bruin pressed him for an answer to the question that University of California administrators have been scrambling to solve: Why are we paying more for less? This year, UCLA faces a $200 million budget shortfall, which is being covered by the 32 percent tuition increase and 10 percent cuts to academic departments.
Obama, who has proposed to spend $12 billion over the next 10 years on the nation’s community colleges, did not suggest a similar bailout for the UC.
We weren’t expecting he would. Difficult decisions must be made about where federal dollars are best spent, and funding the UC is, as the name implies, a state responsibility.
The president’s answer was more along the lines of tough advice.
The primary goal of a public university is education, he said.
Universities need to take more heat for why, when times get bad, educational quality takes the hit.
“You’re not going to a university to join a spa; you’re going there to learn so that you can have a fulfilling career,” he said. “If all the amenities of a public university start jacking up the cost of tuition significantly, that’s a problem.”
The irony of this statement can’t be lost on UCLA, which has hundreds of millions of dollars invested in construction across campus ““ the Hill, Pauley Pavilion, Young Research Library and South Campus. Of course, any administrator will tell you these projects have been in the works for decades, the funds for them are locked in, and the time to act is now. We understand.
Still, this board believes the president has a point, though he glosses over the sticky specifics.
We face larger class sizes, fewer teaching assistants and reduced major requirements. The issue is that when the state, in a crisis, decides to slash funds from higher education, the UC’s budget for faculty and academic departments should have a larger safety net.
The university needs to find ways to draw more funding ““ public, private or taken from tuition ““ that will be invested directly in academics. If this means fewer funds for structural expansion, so be it.
Obama’s other point was that we, as paying students, should hold administrators more accountable for their policies.
“You should know where your tuition is going,” he said. “There should be a pie chart at every university that says, out of every dollar you spend in tuition, here’s where your money is going.”
We haven’t seen any such pie chart. We agree, though, that there should be a clearer explanation of how our tuition, and our housing fees, for that matter, are being spent.
With all this in mind, we look forward to hearing less about how the university will streamline and refocus our education and more about how it plans to restore it.
