Dream Fund can save Covel tutorials

The solution almost seems too obvious. The university quietly cut Covel tutorials, the only tutoring resource open to all undergraduates.

Since then, student leaders, tutors and administrators involved in the program have all been scrambling in their own ways to save it.

All the while, the UCLA Foundation is sitting on a recently-created $100 million fund to specifically support research and academics.

Judith Smith, vice provost and dean for undergraduate education, announced the cuts three weeks ago and is planning to restructure the campus-wide tutoring program to both save costs and operate from alternative sources of funding Smith’s hope to save the program is needed; if the university does not have a program like Covel, UCLA will be the only UC without a tutoring program open to all students.

First-years who are thrown into the rigors of UCLA need the resource. Especially for freshmen transitioning into college, there is a necessity for the close interaction that is lacking in lecture halls and even discussion sections.

Covel tutorials service 3,000 students, while hundreds of peer learning facilitators are given the opportunity to develop their teaching skills and have a part-time job on campus.

Covel costs about $500,000 a year to maintain ““ a small slice of the university’s billion-dollar core budget. Last year, Covel faced cuts, and student government fronted $20,000 from surplus funding.

But student coffers are not a sustainable means of supporting a university program. UCLA needs a guaranteed funding source for a program as essential as Covel tutorials, and an endowment can do that.

All the while, the Dream Fund, established by a landmark donation from a billionaire investor on Feb. 14, leaves $100 million at the behest of the UCLA Foundation to support research and academics.

The Dream Fund is a rare nine-digit gift with the even rarer earmark of going to the university’s core mission rather than specific projects or programs.

So often do donors restrict their large gifts to construction projects or projects that do not directly benefit students’ education. The Dream Fund can be used in a very tangible way that provides students with a very concrete benefit, namely, preserving an essential service.

The Foundation must see how tutoring fits into the Dream Fund’s mission of supporting students. How is a program that every other campus in the UC offers and helps more than 3,000 students here as well, and provides jobs and leadership experience be anything but essential? The Dream Fund is the university’s long-term answer to keeping tutoring.