The University of California is facing a tight budget because the state hasn’t funded it adequately. To raise money, the University of California is cutting the number of Californians who can attend the state’s flagship universities in favor of out-of-state and international students who pay higher tuition. Where does this end? Are state legislators going to be willing to provide funds in the future to a state institution that is decreasing the number of state residents it serves?
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5/11/2012 | U.S. News & World Report highlights ideas from "Moving On Up: How Tuition Tax Breaks Increasingly Favor the Upper-Middle Class." 
5/11/2012 | In Diverse, Steve Burd comments on the Obama administration's plans to address student debt. 
5/11/2012 | Kevin Carey talks to Salon about the government's role in rising student debt.
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Given that many of the students at UC Berkeley and UCLA come from wealthy families, wouldn’t it be fairer to raise the “sticker price” to market rate while at the same time dramatically increasing financial aid to students from low-to-moderate income families? Around 40% of the students at UC Berkeley come from families who earn >$125k/yr.
My folks have friends who sent 4 children through the UC system. The dad is a business executive and the mom is a lawyer. Together they have an income probably well over a quarter million dollars. Yet full-price for UC tuition is less than half of what similar private schools charge. Why on earth should the CA taxpayers be subsidizing the tuition of wealthy families like my parents’ friends to that extent?
I’ve given this some thought. I grew up in California and “escaped.” And I think the UC solution is a good one…mostly because it is a captialistic, free market approach, which works so much better than the socialistic one that brings so many problems, i.e. racial quotas (just ask the poor Asian students who had worked so hard to get into UC Irvine back in the early 90’s). So, I say more power to you, UC. And, the other great result of this is that perhaps more prospective college students will leave Cali in search of education. What they’ll find, as I did, is that Cali isn’t as great as it thinks it is.
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