{"id":54939,"date":"2022-12-01T09:36:51","date_gmt":"2022-12-01T17:36:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=54939"},"modified":"2022-12-01T09:36:51","modified_gmt":"2022-12-01T17:36:51","slug":"graduate-student-strike-highlights-need-for-greater-state-investment-in-public-universities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=54939","title":{"rendered":"Graduate Student Strike Highlights Need for Greater State Investment in Public Universities"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\n
By<\/span>Ethnic Media Services<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n
\"\"<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\n
\n

By\u00a0Louis Freedberg<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The strike of academic student workers at the University of California, now in its third week, has major implications for public education, which is why it is\u00a0being watched closely<\/a>\u00a0by educators throughout the nation.<\/p>\n

If the students get anywhere close to forcing the 10-campus university system to meet their demands, it could set a precedent that universities pay its student workers a living wage.<\/p>\n

That would run counter to the prevailing model where universities rely on graduate students \u2013 and postgraduate researchers \u2013 to carry out essential teaching and research functions, without having to meet their basic living expenses, and especially the cost of housing.<\/p>\n

State\u2019s Disinvestment and Tuition at Public Universities<\/strong><\/h3>\n

In fact, the state of California has mostly gone in just the opposite direction over the last half century by disinvesting in the university, and instead turning to both undergraduate and graduate students to pick up an ever larger share of its operating costs by charging many of them tuition.<\/p>\n

The scale of the state\u2019s disinvestment has been breathtaking. In 1980-81,\u00a087% of the university\u2019s core budget<\/a>\u00a0came from Sacramento.\u00a0\u00a0Four decades later, state funding had plummeted\u00a0to merely 39%<\/a>\u00a0of the core budget.<\/p>\n

This is not a recent development.\u00a0\u00a0Over a decade ago then-UC Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau described his flagship campus\u00a0as a federal university<\/a>\u00a0because it was receiving more money from federal research grants and student aid than it was from the state.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reality is that with the progressive disinvestment in higher education by the state, the state is becoming a tertiary player,\u201d Birgeneau\u00a0said at the time<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Student Enrollment Has Doubled<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Further putting pressure on the university is the state\u2019s 60-year-old \u00a0Master Plan for Higher Education<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u00a0decrees that the university enroll the top 12.5% of high school graduates.<\/p>\n

That may have seemed reasonable at the time when the state population was around 16 million. But today the population is 40 million.<\/p>\n

As a result, student enrollment has soared, more than doubling over the past four decades.\u00a0 Another factor \u2013 a welcome one \u2014 is that an increasing proportion of the high school students are meeting the requirements for admission.<\/p>\n

But it has also put more pressure on the university, which has opened only one new campus \u2014 UC Merced\u2014 over the last half century. With an enrollment still under 10,000, Merced has only partially addressed the overcrowding issue.<\/p>\n

Complicating the university\u2019s basic operational model is that the University of California enrolls proportionately far\u00a0fewer graduate students<\/a>\u00a0than comparable private universities. \u00a0 As a result, it must draw on a smaller pool of graduate students to help with research and teach sections in ever-larger lecture classes.<\/p>\n

Housing Costs<\/strong><\/h3>\n

All this is happening at a time when California students are facing among the highest housing costs in the nation \u2013 at a university that has turned increasingly to students to pay a greater share of its core operating costs. \u00a0 That\u2019s despite\u00a0the 1868 charter establishing the university<\/a>\u00a0declaring that \u201cadmission and tuition shall be free to all residents of the state.\u201d<\/p>\n

One positive sign is that during his first term,\u00a0Gov. Gavin Newsom<\/a>\u00a0departed from many of his predecessors by meaningfully calling for, and providing, greater investments in the university. But that was made possible by the record surpluses the state has enjoyed.<\/p>\n

Now those surpluses are coming to an end. It would not be surprising if Sacramento reverted once again to trimming the state\u2019s contribution to UC. This counterproductive dynamic must be reversed, however difficult that may be, if California still wants to have a world-class university system that can compete with private institutions.<\/p>\n

A Broken Business Model<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The stakes for many other public universities are arguably even higher than they are at the University of California, which generally pays its students workers more than most other public universities do. In fact UC President Michael Drake says the university is offering compensation \u201con a par with top private research universities.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not all students would necessarily agree with him on that front. But regardless of the outcome of the strike has highlight what is essentially a broken business model at most public and many private universities: being able to rely on students for essential services without having to pay them a living wage.<\/p>\n

What it also points to, at the University of California and elsewhere, is the contradiction between the desire of state leaders to have great public universities even as they fail to provide them with the resources needed to maintain that status.<\/p>\n

Louis Freedberg, a UC Berkeley-trained anthropologist and veteran education journalist, is former executive director of EdSource.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ByEthnic Media Services Nov 30, 2022...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54939","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54939","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54939"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54940,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54939\/revisions\/54940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}