A Sentimental Education

CA's budget cutting has struck the state's "other" university system, the 23-campus Cal State Universities. The usual draconian cuts "on the backs of the students" are being debated and denounced: CSU To Join UC In Cutting Pay, Raising Tuition

Just as the University of California's Board of Regents was voting Thursday morning to cut $813 million from the UC budget, the chancellor of the California State University system announced he will ask trustees to approve a hefty 20 percent fee hike on students next week.

CSU Chancellor Charles Reed said he will also ask for layoffs, unpaid furloughs and a range of other measures Tuesday to save the university system $584 million.

"It's nothing short of a mega-meltdown financially," Reed said.

(snip)

California State University's Board of Trustees will decide Tuesday whether to approve Chancellor Charles Reed's plan to cut $584 million from the CSU budget. Here are the basics of his plan:

Higher student fees: A 20 percent fee hike, on top of the 10 percent increase approved in May, would bring the cost of attending a CSU school to $4,827.

Furloughs: All employees would take off two unpaid days per month.

Enrollment reduction: About 450,000 students attend CSU. Efforts would be made to reduce enrollment by 40,000 over two years.

Campus cuts of $190 million: Layoffs, course reductions, freezes on maintenance, construction, travel and more. Cut to be decided by officials at each campus.

Just to add to the sense of chaos and panic, the linked article fails to mention that tuition will cost $4,827 per year. At $2,413.50 per semester, CSU is still a bargain. I graduated from San Francisco State, and the education I got there was just as good as the one I got while attending Expensive Private U for one year. Most CSU students can actually work their way through school, a virtual impossibility at private schools and even most state schools. As such, most CSU students take these sorts of fee increases in stride:

Not all students are angry.

"I understand that they can't do anything about it," shrugged Aznaur Midov, an incoming senior at San Francisco State University who studies banking. "The university has to help itself to survive."

Lest anyone take Midov for an affluent gent, he works as a waiter and as a security guard, and he pays his tuition with - yes - a credit card.

The adults who work at CCU, on the other hand, are up in arms as their cloistered world is invaded by the barbarian hordes led by the implacable forces of Recession, Balance Sheets, and Macroeconomics:

Employees are worried.

"If my pay is cut, I could very well lose my house," said Jane Veeder, a professor of visual communication design at San Francisco State. "Is the CSU going to co-sign my loan?"

At Cal State Long Beach, librarian Tiffini Travis said she was hoping to teach a community service seminar this fall in which freshmen would help feed the homeless at a local shelter.

"Now I'm afraid we're going to be the ones eating there," she said.

Would it be out of bounds if I guess that a "professor of visual communication design" is the sort of progressive who supports the unionization, high public pension costs, environmentally correct "no growth" laws, taxes on "the rich," and other initiatives that have raised the cost of housing (and everything else) in CA? Now, she's flummuxed that the state government has grown too big to be sustained over the long term? It was inevitable! By the way, having CSU "co-sign your mortgage" is the sort of thinking that lies at the root of the present crisis, demonstrating that some people still don't get it.