Understanding Financial Aid: Not Easy

I have always wanted to know what it means when UC says that students would not have to pay tuition if their parents made less than $80,000 a year. So I went to the UCLA financial aid estimator, and I punched in a few variables, and here is what I found.

In the case of a family of four with an income of $75,000, here is what we get: Parent Contribution:?$10,860.00;
Estimated Award Letter
Grant Award:?$11,586.00
Self Help Award:?$9,200.00
Family Help Award:?$10,860.00

Estimated Total Price of Attendance
University Fees?+$12,685.00
Room and Board?+$13,980.00
Books and Supplies?+$1,509.00
Transportation?+$789.00
Personal?+$1,368.00
Health Insurance?+$1,225.00
Loan Fees?+$90.00
Total Cost of Attendance:?$31,646.00

So, the first thing you might want to know is what are �Self Help� and �Family Help� awards. I looked all over the web site and several other sites, and I could not find any definition of these categories. I then called the UCLA financial aid office, and after waiting several minutes on hold, I finally got a live voice, but this voice could not answer my questions, and so I was transferred to a supervisor. When I asked him what these terms meant, he said he thinks �self help award� refers to student loans and work-study aid, but he had never heard of a �family help award.� I told him that it is on his web site, but he responded that the federal government is requiring the university to put this information online, but they are not responsible for its content.

I am guessing that the family help award is a loan, but I really don�t know; however, what I do know is that while everyone talks about the high cost of tuition, the biggest driver of costs and student debt is housing and related expenses. It turns out that this issue tracks national data. In 1990-91, total tuition, fees, room and board at public universities averaged $5,585, and in 2009-10, this cost rose to $16,712, which represents an increase of $11,127. Meanwhile for community colleges, the total cost in 1990-91 was $3,467, and in 2009-10, it went to $7,703 for an increase of $3,403. During the same period, average tuition and fees for public universities rose from $2,159 to $8,123 for an increase of $5,964, while for community colleges tuition and fees went from $824 to $2,285 for a total increase of $1,461. This means that the biggest cost increases for public higher education concern room and board, but few people ever discuss this fact.

Next Week I plan to return to my last blog on how to make all public higher education free. I had to take it down because there was an error in my analysis.

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The Ugly Face of Austerity: Pepper Spraying the Other

The image of a UC police officer using a weapon with indifference on prone students may become the iconic image of the Age of Austerity. This scene, which went viral on the Internet, tells us much about our current political and economic moment: young people protesting the decreased support from the state are treated with brutality and indifference.

In reading the recently released report on the UC pepper spraying "incident," I was struck by two reoccurring themes: the university administrators and police wanted to see the student protesters as outside elements, and they sought to protect their imagined daughters from sex. This underlying paranoid fantasy is brought to the surface in several moments in the report. For instance, "The administration did not consider the Occupy movement encampment to be a conventional campus protest. The Leadership Team appeared to perceive it as a vehicle through which non-affiliates might enter the campus and endanger students." We can read the term "non-affiliates" as shorthand for dangerous, unspecified Others, and as the report relates, the central irrational fear of the administration appeared to be that these dangerous Others would violate �young girls�: "�We were worried at the time about that [nonaffiliates] because the issues from Oakland were in the news and the use of drugs and sex and other things, and you know here we have very young students . . . we were worried especially about having very young girls and other students with older people who come from the outside without any knowledge of their record . . . if anything happens to any student while we�re in violation of policy, it�s a very tough thing to overcome.� Representing college students as "young girls" and protesters as dangerous sexualized Others serves to justify a violent reaction by a protective, paternalistic institution.

Of course, this cultural fantasy of the unknown Other violating �young girls� was often used in the American South to justify the lynching of African Americans because of their threat to white female purity. In fact the sexualization of Others has historically helped Christian invaders to justify brutalizing and dehumanizing native people; however, if you think I am reading too much into the passage from the report cited above, let us ponder the following statement: "Vice Chancellor Meyer expressed similar concerns in an interview conducted on Dec. 7. He explained, �our context at the time was seeing what�s happening in the City of Oakland, seeing what�s happening in other municipalities across the country, and not
being able to see a scenario where [a UC Davis Occupation] ends well . . . Do we lose control and have non-affiliates become part of an encampment? So my fear is a longterm occupation with a number of tents where we have an undergraduate student and a non-affiliate and there�s an incident. And then I�m reporting to a parent that a nonaffiliate has done this unthinkable act with your daughter, and how could we let that happen?�" Once again, in this cultural fantasy, the administration sees itself as protecting the purity of its daughters by eliminating the threat posed by a violating Other.

Why it is important to understand this underlying fantasy is that it helps us to understand how the administration could see its own students as threatening outsiders intent on corrupting their own precious purity. From this perspective, Lt. Pike was not simply protecting public safety; rather, he was following the administration's lead by trying to eliminate the Other from the space of the same. I use these abstract terms to point to the underlying psychology behind austerity politics in California: Just as the Other (brown and black students) started to enter into our higher education system, a tax revolt resulted in the defunding of public universities. Moreover, as our public schools become increasingly self-segregated, austerity becomes color-coded. Older and Whiter Californians simply do not want to share their wealth in order to support the education of young people of color.

While we have been socialized not to talk about race and to keep our prejudices indirect and coded, it is clear that even though the police at UC Davis knew they were looking at UC Davis students, what they saw were wild outsiders threatening to violate their daughters. Only serious and committed education can help us to overcome these collective cultural fantasies that at once dehumanize some students and purify others.

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The UC Budget and the Damage Done

At the last UC Regents meeting, a discussion of the UC budget outlines the following evidence of the deterioration of educational quality in the UC system:

� At UC Riverside, they will walk onto a campus where enrollment has grown in the last three years by nearly 3,000 students � many of them the first in their families ever to attend college � while at the same time the number of faculty has been reduced by five percent. The result: class sizes have grown by 33 percent. Introductory physics classes that used to average 95 students have exploded in size in three years to 573 students.

� At UC Santa Cruz, students will be provided with 84 fewer course offerings and their class sizes will have spiked 33 percent. The student-faculty ratio has exploded by nearly 15 percent, and the campus lacks funding for 125 faculty FTE � 14 percent of its faculty positions. Yet for all the cuts, the campus still faces a daunting $38 million budget gap.

� UC Santa Barbara has over 1,000 more students than it did three years ago, but the number of staff has declined by 450 (nearly 11 percent) during that time, and the faculty has remained the same size. The results are fewer student services, larger classes and discussion sections, and reductions and eliminations in many programs.

� And across the system, pension costs alone will rise to $1.8 billion annually in the next five years � an expense that campuses did not have to shoulder as recently as three years ago. If there is no increase in either State funds or tuition during this time, campuses will have to find the equivalent of funding for 7,000 staff or 3,900 faculty to fund this expense alone.

In other words, classes are getting bigger, courses are being cut, the number of faculty has been reduced, but the number of students has gone up. Moreover, the campuses are about to be hit with major pension costs, and it is unclear whether the state budget will provide any significant funding for the UC system.

These internal budget cuts not only mean a shortchanging of undergraduate instruction, but they also result in a longer time to degree, which in itself restricts access and reduces affordability.

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Meeting at the White House, the State Tax Initiative, and the UC Regents

On March 27th, I made a presentation at the White House on how to control tuitin increases at American research universities. My first major point was that any attempt to contain tuition at public universities has to deal with state budget cuts for higher ed. I was told that the administration is aware of this issue, and they have been meeting with the presidents of several public universities to come up with a way to motivate states to stabilize higher ed funding.

My second major point was that while President Obama has been stressing affordability and access, he also has to focus on the quality of instruction. To make this point, I discussed how universities have been increasing the sizes of their classes and their dependence on under-supported non-tenure-track faculty to drive down the costs of instruction; meanwhile, the cost of administration, athletics, and construction has continued to increase. As I argue in my forthcoming book, the only way to control costs in higher education is to focus on providing quality instruction and research, but there are no incentives to make universities concentrate on their core missions.

One possible way of changing how universities spend their funds is to rank and rate universities based, in part, on the percentage of their budget that they spend on direct instructional costs (faculty salaries and benefits). I suggested to the administration that they add to their new College Scorecard statistics on how much of a university�s budget is spent on direct instructional costs and what percentage of their student credit hours are taught by full-time faculty. If universities had to report on these factors, they would need to commit more attention and funding to their core mission.

We also discussed President Obama�s fight to stop student loan interest rates from doubling this summer. I mentioned that in California, we are trying to freeze tuition by increasing the taxes on the wealthy, but we still need the federal government to combine the current emphasis on access and affordability with a focus on educational quality. Moreover, in the case of the UC system, it is clear that we have to force the governor and the legislature to dedicate new tax revenue to higher education. In fact, at the recent Regents meeting, several of the regents said that they do not think they can support the governor�s tax initiative if it does not dedicate funds directly to the UC in order to prevent another tuition increase. I have been meeting with people from the governor�s office and key legislators to push for a major increase in UC funding, but so far, no one has committed to guaranteeing UC funding and tying the higher education budget to the new tax initiative. We all need to work together now to push the governor and the legislature to provide enough funding to roll back recent tuition increases.

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The New Tax Initiative and UC Funding

There have been a few big changes on the tax initiative front the last few days. As many of you might know, a deal has been made to combine the Millionaire�s Tax and the Governor�s tax initiative. I will list the details of the new initiative below, and in many ways, it is an improvement over the governor's initial proposal, but unlike the Millionaire's Tax, it does not dedicate revenue for higher education. So we are currently meeting with legislators to put new language into the state budget to dedicate funds to higher ed. It is important to stress that we were told by legislators that even if the Millionaire's Tax provided money for higher ed, the legislature would still have to reduce higher ed funding to balance the budget, so we think the new initiative might turn out to be better for the UC system. We will now have to work together to push the legislature and the governor to re-fund higher ed.

We met with the governor�s budget people and several legislators on March 19th to push for budget language that would increase transparency and funding for the UC system. If all goes well, tuition will be frozen for three years, and the state will increase its contribution to the UC system by at least 4% each year.

Here�s a description of the new initiative:

1. PERSONAL INCOME TAX:
a. 1% increase on incomes of $250,000 ($500,000 for couples). No change from Governor�s initiative.
b. 2% increase on incomes of $300,000 ($600,000 for couples). Governor�s initiative was 1.5%.
c. 3% increase on incomes of $500,000 ($1 million for couples). Governor�s initiative was 2%.
d. These tax increases remain in place for 7 years. Governor�s initiative was 5 years.
2. SALES TAX: increase � cent (Governor�s was � cent). Same expiration as the Governor�s.
3. STRUCTURE: The measure will be based on the Governor�s initiative structure, with the changes noted in #1 and #2 above.
4. REVENUES (NOTE: THESE ESTIMATES ARE PRELIMINARY): This new measure will generate about $9 billion for the 2012-13 budget (up from the $6.9 billion in the Governor�s initiative).

Also, there will be additional comments in statements from the principals about re-investing in higher education as a priority. (Not to mention the fact that the new measure will generate higher revenues.)

We need to pressure the legislature and governor to dedicate funds to higher education in the May Revise budget.

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Off-Scale Salaries and the Privatization of the University

While most studies of university compensation look at average salaries, I have stressed that we need to examine wage inequalities. For instance, in the case of UC senate faculty, we have seen a growing disparity between the top earners and everyone else. A recent study of faculty compensation helps us to see that a major cause for this increased disparity is the use of off-scale salaries, which are usually negotiated between an administrator and an individual faculty member. This privatizing system not only creates a system of competing free agents, but it also decreases transparency by circumventing the peer review process.

The Academic Council�s report shows how the use of off-scale salaries varies from campus to campus; here is the percentage of professors with off-scale salaries on each campus: Merced 88%; UCLA 80%; Santa Cruz 73%; Berkeley 72%; Irvine 66%; Santa Barbara 66%; San Diego 64%; Riverside 59%; and Davis 52%. The fact that Merced is so high could point to the recent move to hire most professors off scale. Currently, in the system, �91% of assistant professors are hired off-scale, 94% of associate professors, and 80% of full professors. On average, 89% of new hires were off-scale.�

While some argue that this need for off-scale salaries is due to the faulty nature of the current professorial salary scale, others believe that by keeping the scale low, administrators and individual faculty members are able to justify making secret, private deals. In response to these issues, the Academic Council wants to create a new system, which would: �Maintain funding for merit actions based on existing merit and CAP review processes, such that faculty who advance to a new rank and/or step receive a new salary at least equal to the average of campus colleagues at the same rank and step.� Thus, instead of relying on off-scale salary negotiations, this new system would combine the current merit system with a new way of making sure that all faculty of the same rank would have similar salaries.

The major problem with this good proposal is that it is hard to imagine faculty members and administrators moving away from a system of private negotiations. Like the general economy, everyone thinks they are going to be the exception, so no one wants a more equal system. In other words, even the people who do not receive star salaries believe in the star system because they imagine that someday they will also be stars. So if this new compensation structure did go in effect, what would probably happen is that a majority of faculty would still receive off-scale increases, which would result in raising the average salaries for each rank, while still maintaining the large disparities within ranks and between campuses. The only way to change this system is to simply update the salary scale and get rid of most off-scale negotiations.

At the center of this question of compensation are the debates over equality versus individualism and public versus private. While many faculty members insist that they want to keep the university public, and they believe in pursuing social and economic equality, everything in the system is moving towards a more unequal and privatized structure.

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March 5th Occupy the Capitol Recap

March 5th brought thousands of students, teachers, labor activists, and occupiers to Sacramento to protest cuts to higher education and push for the Millionaire�s tax to fund vital public services. While students were inside lobbying legislators to protect our public colleges and universities, thousands marched to the Capitol for a spirited rally that included speeches by Lt. Governor Gavin Newsome, Senate Leader Steinberg, and Assembly Leader Perez. While the legislators stated that the best way to support higher education is to support the governor�s tax plan, most of the speakers argued for the Millionaire�s tax.

After the rally, hundreds of people entered the Capitol and attempted to occupy the building. There was a heavy police presence, and for several hours, we were allowed to hold a general assembly to vote on our demands. The central demands were to support the millionaire�s tax, make public higher education free, and forgive student loan debt. At about 5 p.m., the police decided to close the building early, and we were soon told that we would be arrested if we did not leave. During this time, three students were arrested for trying to hang a banner from the second floor of the Rotunda. When I confronted the California Highway Patrol officers about their efforts to choke off the constitutional rights of free speech and the freedom of assembly, I was told that the students are a threat to public safety because they were blocking the pathway to the exists. I guess if you put highway patrol people in charge of the Capitol, they see everything in terms of traffic.

At 5:30, we held a scheduled rally outside of the Capitol. In a short speech, I argued that we are not only fighting for more revenue for higher education in the state of California, but our push for the Millionaire�s tax is a national fight to reverse forty years of conservative tax cuts and the de-funding of public education. I did a radio interview during the rally on this topic that you can listen at here.

After the rally, we attempted to deliver pizzas to the people who were still in the Capitol. Hundreds of us marched to the other side of the building where we met a very large group of police in full military-style riot gear. We told them that we wanted to deliver the food to the people in the building, but we were informed that the occupiers had to come out to get their pizza. We then a long standoff, which was punctuated by several chants like, �How do we want our Pizza?,� �We want it hot!� and �Let them Eat!�

We were never able to deliver the pizza, and soon 70 occupiers were arrested, but we did deliver our message. I want to thank Charlie Eaton from UAW, who did a great job coordinating many of these activities. To support the Millionaire�s tax go here, and for more media about March 5th, go here.

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