Submission: Democrats’ funding plan would hurt campus diversity
By Daily Bruin Staff
Dec. 8, 2014 1:41 a.m.
The California Senate Democrats’ new funding plan is not that at all. The proposed bill claims to increase state funding by $156 million for the 2015-2016 year. The Democrats presented the bill as such even though it cuts funding to the Middle Class Scholarship program and still increases tuition by 17 percent for nonresidents. The bill merely relocates the burden of the same tuition hikes passed last month by the University of California Board of Regents from the overall student body to nonresidents. How is this possible?
As Jeong Park correctly notes in the Daily Bruin, the “additional funds” come from the cutting of the Middle Class Scholarship program, which currently provides 19,000 students in the UC system with an average of $1,100 each. This means that the state is not setting aside more money for higher education. It is simply relocating scholarship funds to the University’s general fund that can be used for salary increases, among numerous other things, and giving the UC administration more power over where the money is spent. Whereas in the scholarship program the funds were specifically guaranteed for families making under $150,000, a significant amount of the money could potentially be put toward increasing the salaries of a bloated UC administration that has grown 267 percent from 1991-2013.
The Democrats’ bill cuts funding by $45 million by excluding the automatic funding increase in the Middle Class Scholarship Act from the new bill. Here at UCLA, the former scholarship funds may go toward increasing more administrators’ salaries, while nonresident students are charged astronomical tuition rates. Earlier this year, the UC Regents granted a pay raise of 20 percent to three UC chancellors.
Whereas the Democrats’ bill argues that nonresidents should pay a premium to attend UCLA’s “premium” educational program, I believe that discriminating against students from diverse backgrounds, whether out-of-state or international, only hurts UCLA’s commitment to a diverse campus. Even if nonresidents continue to attend the university at such an expense, UCLA will be receiving an increasingly elite and wealthy group of students, a move that fails to meet the diversity goals of our university. Any argument that financial aid will increase proportionally and ensure a diverse campus is inappropriate considering that student loans are the means of increase and act as a lifetime chain to debt that is inescapable even under bankruptcy filing.
Lastly, the Democrats’ bill adds an additional 5,000 students to the UC system without additional funding, and it is problematic to say the least. Class sizes at UCLA have already been growing. Adding more students reduces the quality of education if it is not paralleled with additional faculty. Although the administration has grown 267 percent, the faculty to student ratio has been reduced from 14:1 to 11.6:1 from 1993 to 2013, leaving professors overwhelmed and unable to give the necessary time and attention students need.
Overall, the bill is simply a face value political act conveying the image of a sympathetic Democratic state Senate. But the end result is the same as that of the November hikes.
Holland is a fourth-year history and political science student.
