The across-the-board tuition increase approved by University of California regents and California State University trustees last week is bad enough on its surface.
Students, and in the majority of cases their bill-footing parents, have endured one tuition increase after another, shaking up a two-tiered university system that was once among the nation's models of accessibility and affordability.
But what really makes the increase unconscionable is the disproportionate harm it inflicts on Central Valley universities such as Cal State Bakersfield.
The increase -- 10 percent at CSU schools, 7 percent at UC schools -- hurts everywhere. But in the valley, where widespread poverty, rock-bottom university enrollment rates and a blue-collar and sub-blue-collar economy are the status quo, it's potentially devastating.
Which students will have to dig deeper, relatively speaking, to come up with that extra 10 percent per year (which at CSUB comes to $252)? Students at Cal State Monterey Bay? San Diego State? Or students from Bakersfield, where the poverty rate is 38 percent higher than the statewide rate and per capita income is 31 percent below the state average?
Which region's potential freshmen are already least prepared for the academic rigors of university life, let alone the financial hurdles? Those in Orange County? Marin County? Or here, where the county's best high school seniors passed advanced placement tests -- one measure of college readiness -- barely 20 percent of the time? That's less than half the statewide rate of 45 percent.
Wednesday's dual vote to raise tuition is the fifth increase in six years. Annual costs for undergraduates at CSU, the nation's largest four-year public institution, will jump to $3,400. Since 2002, CSU fees have jumped 76 percent. As it is, a university education is not a part of our local culture. Diminishing affordability only exacerbates the problem. CSUB was supposed to have 15,000 students by 2000, according to the school's decades-old master plan. It has half that number today, and escalating tuition costs will do nothing to reverse it. Fast-rising college expenses are pushing the economy of the entire county in the wrong direction.
An educated population attracts employers looking for workers with university-level skill sets, energizes the local economy by bringing higher-paying jobs, gives homegrown talent a greater incentive to stay and enlivens the cultural environment by creating patrons of the various arts -- further fortifying an environment likelier to attract the sort of employer we ought to covet. Just 14 percent of Kern residents -- half the rate of California as a whole -- have four-year degrees. This trend toward tuition increases will only further dampen those numbers.
Politicians give plenty of lip service to the importance of higher education, but their failure to meaningfully address the problem speaks volumes.
Ditto for the CSU trustees, who like to talk about the value of a quality faculty but can't seem to pay them what they're worth -- even as they approve sweetheart packages for retiring university presidents such as CSUB's Tomás Arciniega.
Enough already.
It's time for some leadership on the education front, both in California and in Washington, D.C. John Garamendi, the state's new lieutenant governor, said all the right things during a "listening tour" of university campuses in the Central Valley last month. Here's hoping he embarks on a "doing tour" sometime soon and that Kern County is his first stop.
by Robert Price, Bakersfield Californian, March 17, 2007