www.csua.org/u/jpe -> www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-compact7oct07,1,3349297.story?ctrack=1&cset=true
California | Local News Lawrence K Ho / Los Angeles Times SEEKING MORE PAY: Victor Vincent, a custodian at UCLA for 17 years, attended the UC regents meeting in July. We cant even afford to send our kids to the university, and we dont understand why you dont understand that, he told them. Less to bank on at state universities Seeking more pay Lawrence K Ho / Los Angeles Times SEEKING MORE PAY: Victor Vincent, a custodian at UCLA for 17 years, attended the UC regents meeting in July. We cant even afford to send our kids to the university, and we dont understand why you dont understand that, he told them. Educators fear a 2004 funding deal has schools sliding toward mediocrity By Richard C Paddock, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer October 7, 2007 SANTA BARBARA -- Library assistant Linda Snook isn't usually someone to stand up in front of hundreds of people and discuss her personal finances. But when the UC Board of Regents met here this summer, she pleaded for help. Snook told the regents that she makes $26,000 a year working full time at UC Santa Barbara and pays more than half of that in rent. Her supervisors have recommended her for raises, she said, but there is never enough money in the budget. She'd like to enroll in graduate school at UCSB, but, on her pay, that's a distant dream.
click to enlarge "I am barely making it," she told the regents. Students, custodians, campus police, clerical workers, faculty and administrators regularly beseech the regents to give them more money. But soaring student fees, huge fundraising drives and controversial corporate donations have not made up for a sharp decline in the state's commitment to higher education. UC administrators and faculty fear that waning commitment is eroding the 10-campus system's reputation for excellence and will trigger a slide toward mediocrity. Already, the salaries of professors and workers lag behind comparable institutions while faculty posts remain open and more classes are taught by teaching assistants. Administrators and faculty also worry that the University of California and the 23-campus California State University will become de facto private institutions, where most of the costs are paid by students. Officials at UC and CSU say that each institution needs about $1 billion more in annual funding to match their level of quality in 2001, the last time the universities were in relatively good fiscal health. University leaders say the two public institutions are the state's engine of long-term growth and its main supplier of highly skilled workers. But the universities' importance to state policymakers is declining, at least as measured in tax dollars. In 1970, the state spent 69% of its budget on the University of California. Unlike other state-sponsored programs -- such as health, schools and community colleges -- UC and CSU have no level of state funding guaranteed by law. Will the two huge university systems, with 665,000 students, become the equivalent of private institutions? "I worry about it every day, because we must continue to look for other sources of support," said UC President Robert C Dynes. "And the question is, do we end up becoming a private institution to get those resources?" In May 2004, Dynes and his CSU counterpart, Chancellor Charles Reed, traveled to Sacramento to meet privately with Gov. The state was facing a $14-billion shortfall and the new governor was threatening the universities with major cutbacks for the third consecutive year. The two university chiefs struck a deal with the governor: They agreed to slash spending that year by hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for a funding formula lasting until 2011. Titled the "Higher Education Compact," the agreement calls for modest annual increases in state funds, private fundraising to help pay for basic programs, and large student fee hikes, especially for graduate and professional students. Many UC regents were not told of the deal until it was done. Richard C Blum, who became the regents' chairman this year, called the lack of disclosure "an error in judgment." Reed and Dynes, who will step down by June, say the compact stopped the universities' bleeding and gave them fiscal stability. But critics say the pact has left UC and CSU chronically underfunded and locked the universities into a steady decline. "Bob Dynes and Charlie Reed fundamentally changed the nature of higher education in California without any public debate," said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who chaired a faculty committee that analyzed the agreement. "The effect of the compact is a permanent substantial reduction in the quality of the university." The compact itself acknowledges that the universities have "significant unmet funding needs. and insufficient funding of programs critical to the academic enterprise." Among its many provisions, the compact set a little-noticed precedent by calling for the use of private fundraising to pay for core university operations. "UC will continue to seek additional private resources and maximize other fund sources available to the University to support basic programs," it says.
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