In the know: CSU students to keep grants

The tuition grants that thousands of graduate students in the California State University system depend on are safe from cuts for now, but the decision to preserve them is likely a Band-Aid solution to the problem of financing public education.

On Wednesday, CSU Chancellor Charles Reed and the CSU’s 23 campus presidents agreed to continue providing some $90 million in tuition grants to about 20,000 of the CSU system’s 40,000 or so graduate students.

This decision was received enthusiastically by the thousands of CSU students who signed a petition initiated by a pair of San Francisco students who found their usual amount of grant aid absent from their financial aid statements and feared being unable to afford tuition without the grants.

While the students were rightfully angered by the CSU system’s attempt to withhold funds allocated to their tuition grants, their recovery of these grants do not offset the bleak fiscal reality of the CSU system.

After all, there is a definite risk that the CSU system may lose $200 million in state funding for the next budget year, in addition to the $750 million slashed this year alone.

With such drastic cuts in the face of a large state budget deficit, it seems only a matter of time before tuition grants, along with other forms of financial aid, are targeted for further cuts.

If these grants are cut in the future, graduate students will find it difficult to recover aid elsewhere, as they are ineligible for the undergraduate grants provided by the Cal Grants and Pell Grant programs. In addition, federal subsidies for graduate student loans that kept interest rates down and delayed repayment deadlines were recently discontinued while the student loan debt now stands at an average of $25,000 for graduate students attending public universities.

These negative statistics were not mentioned when the students responsible for delivering their petition of 2,770 signatures celebrated the CSU’s decision to continue providing tuition grants for the next academic year.

It is all too easy to sympathize with the plight of these 20,000 graduate students, especially considering the CSU system’s controversial 10 percent pay raises to a few of its campus presidents.

Students may celebrate the preservation of key financial aid to graduates in state universities for now, but this victory is likely to be short-lived.

While the proposed cuts were irresponsible in that they didn’t provide alternatives for graduate students without increasing the amount of debt they owe in private loans for tuition, it seems almost inevitable that such cuts are to be made in the future.

In addition, should the proposed cuts to funding for public education be made next year, all students may see further tuition hikes and cuts in financial aid for both undergraduates and graduate students, making the tuition grants just part of an incoming period of budgetary austerity in public universities.

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