Colleges’ Budget Crunch Growing

Facing yet another year of multimillion-dollar budget cuts, California’s public colleges and universities, long renowned for their excellence and affordability, may be poised to follow the state’s once-smooth highways into decline.

The severe funding reductions likely to be imposed on the campuses this summer come on top of three years of cuts that have eroded the quantity and quality of offerings, in ways large and small.

At East Los Angeles College, for example, students now find the doors to the campus library closed on Saturdays. At Cal State Fresno, class sizes are climbing and more than 1,500 students who meet admission requirements are turned away.

And at a prestigious UC San Diego oceanography institute, administrators agonize over whether to renege on the funding for a 53-year-old survey of California fisheries or stop maintaining historic collections of fish and shellfish. Or both.

“California has had the very best in public higher education,” said David Ward, president of the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for the nation’s major universities. “The question now is whether it wants to settle for the middle of the pack.”

Across the nation, public colleges and universities have struggled to make do with diminishing shares of state budgets. Many, as in California, have cut programs and raised tuition.

But such changes, Ward noted, may be disproportionately painful when they affect the pillars of a higher education system both historically well-funded and admired nationwide.

At the University of California and California State University systems, the state’s 3-year-old budget crisis already has forced reductions in research, libraries, outreach, administration and student services. Course sections have been trimmed, faculty salaries have slipped below par and the ratio of students to faculty is up.

With each cut, “California is chipping away at the quality” of its carefully nurtured universities, said UC President Robert C. Dynes.

Student fees, which rose dramatically last year, are expected to jump again at the state’s three higher education systems this fall.

At California’s community colleges, considered an affordable gateway to higher education for low-income students and new immigrants, student fees would rise 44% -- from $18 to $26 a unit. With fewer course offerings, students often must draw lots to gain access to community college classes.

The budget proposed in January by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for the year beginning July 1 would make further reductions, including financial aid.

In a dramatic change for California, the governor also would require the UC and Cal State systems to turn eligible students away. Schwarzenegger has asked the universities to cut freshman enrollment this fall by 10%, guaranteeing affected students the right to transfer later from community colleges.

Schwarzenegger said the state has no choice and that the retrenchments are temporary.

Some higher education experts agree. The current cuts, they say, do not necessarily mean a dire future for California universities and colleges.

“I think it’s more cyclical than any real new thing,” said Steve Boilard, director of the higher education unit in the legislative analyst’s office in Sacramento.

But many education leaders said the enrollment curbs are undermining the state’s 1960 master plan for colleges and universities -- a national model with the implied promise of an affordable place in public higher education for all.

“Year by year, we are eroding the master plan and this incredible system of colleges,” said Mark Drummond, chancellor of the state’s community colleges system.

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Funding Cuts, Fee Hikes

On a narrow roadway not far from the main entrance to UC Berkeley, a series of parking spaces is proudly reserved for the institution’s eight current Nobel laureates.

The slots, each marked “NL,” are subtle reminders of the exceptional quality of the scholarship and education the school offers.

The oldest UC campus, UC Berkeley is regularly listed as the nation’s top public university in scholarly and popular rankings, including U.S. News & World Report. Six of the UC’s eight undergraduate campuses are among the 62 leading research institutions with membership in the invitation-only Assn. of American Universities.

But if the governor’s budget is approved, UC’s state funding next year will be $2.67 billion -- $520 million, or 16%, less than it was four years ago, even as its enrollment has climbed 16%.

“You try to accommodate each of these small changes,” UC President Dynes said. “But we may all sit back in 10 years and say, ‘What the hell happened?’ ”

Faculty salaries, Dynes said, have now slipped at least 10% below those at comparable institutions. In 2003-04, the average salary for a tenured or tenure-track professor at the eight schools UC uses in its comparison reports was $101,787; at UC, the average salary was $95,815. The gap is greater between UC campuses and rival institutions. That makes it increasingly difficult for the university to fend off hiring raids, although so far it is holding its own, Dynes said.

The proposal also would push the overall UC faculty-student ratio from around 20 to 1 this year to about 21 to 1 -- twice the ratio at top private schools. The figure, which has crept up gradually in recent years, means larger classes, shorter office hours and fewer opportunities to work alongside professors on research projects. Another casualty is research funding, which has been cut 10% each of the last two years and would drop 5% more under the governor’s plan. Although state research funding is smaller than federal support, programs are feeling the pinch.

At UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, for instance, administrators have scrambled to replace the state money that has helped pay for such projects as the survey, used by the state Department of Fish and Game in fisheries management.

Director Charles Kennel said the institution has patched together interim solutions for most of the center’s jeopardized programs. “It’s still tooth-grinding time,” he said.

Perhaps the biggest concern at UC, though, is the proposal to charge graduate students 40% more next year. Mandatory systemwide fees for California graduate students would rise from about $5,200 a year to more than $7,300, not including campus fees.

“Fewer people would be able to come here,” said Jessica Quindel, an education graduate student at UC Berkeley. “If you couldn’t afford to pay your own way, you couldn’t come.”

Schwarzenegger also wants a 10% increase in fees next year for undergraduates at both UC and Cal State. The hikes, yet to be approved by the universities’ governing boards, would come on top of fee increases of about 40% since December 2002.

UC undergraduates who are California residents would pay an average of $6,028 in systemwide and campus fees next year. In-state Cal State undergrads would pay an average of $2,776.

UC administrators recently asked the university’s Board of Regents to consider alternatives, including the option of boosting undergraduate fees more than suggested -- up to 15% -- and raising graduate fees a little less. The board is expected to vote on the increases in May

“Any time you raise fees, you’re reducing the number of students, especially low-income students, who can afford to go to college,” said Patrick M. Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education.

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Bigger Class Sizes

California State University graduate student Jose Solache, 23, complains that the budget cuts mean students are paying more for their education and getting less.

Solache, who heads Cal State’s systemwide student association, is in the teacher credentialing program at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson. But his hope of one day returning to teach at the elementary school he attended in Lynwood has been slowed by the state’s budget squeeze.

Twice, this last semester and last year as an undergraduate, Solache was unable to get the classes he needed. Now, he said, he will have to stay on at the university at least an extra semester.

The proposed fee increases also will be hard for students like him, said Solache, who carries about $15,000 in loans. “It’s really tough to deal with,” he said. “Especially when you can’t even get the classes you need to finish.”

Cal State Chancellor Charles B. Reed said that is a growing problem for the 23-campus, 400,000-student system.

For the current year, Reed said, budget cuts required Cal State campuses to slash 1,300 course sections, even as they enrolled an additional 15,000 students. That has meant bigger class sizes, up from 27.7 in the fall of 2002 to 28.4 last fall.

Cal State campuses also cut about 1,000 part-time faculty positions and dropped or left vacant the jobs of about 1,700 staff members.

Those staffers “did everything from mowing the grass to keeping the books, providing financial aid and helping students in the library,” Reed said. “These are the unseen people that make an academic life for students.”

Over the last two years, the university has reduced library acquisitions, lengthened maintenance schedules and replaced or updated lab equipment and computers less frequently.

The governor’s budget now demands about $200 million more in spending cuts for the university, including elimination of its outreach and academic assistance programs. But campuses hope to retain some programs, absorbing the cuts instead by dropping enrollment by an extra 20,000 students, in addition to the 4,000 fewer freshmen in the governor’s plan.

At Cal State Fresno, that would play out as an enrollment cut of 1,500 students for the fall, said President John Welty. He said that is especially troubling in an area like the Central Valley, which is trying to transform its agriculture-based economy to one more dependent on an educated work force.

“The valley depends on us for its teachers, engineers, businesspeople, social workers, and it needs more, not less,” Welty said. “That’s why turning students away is so painful.”

At East Los Angeles College, the years of lean budgets are reflected in shortened library hours, fewer tutors for students who need help and trimmed course sections, with more students crammed into remaining classes.

The community college in Monterey Park east of downtown Los Angeles serves about 23,000 full- and part-time students, many of whom are low-income and first-generation college students, said Richard Moyer, vice president of academic affairs.

“Our task is not an easy one in the best of times,” Moyer said. “It’s even tougher right now.”

Students such as Martha Guerrero, 35, say it is harder and harder to enroll in the classes they need. A licensed vocational nurse who is working full time, Guerrero has recently returned to school to take several prerequisites before entering a registered nursing program. But this semester, she managed to get just one class.

“I barely got into Psychology 41. People were standing outside the class and everyone was trying to get in,” perhaps 180 students for a 35-member class, Guerrero said. But landing a space in an algebra course proved impossible, she said: “I’ll have to try again this summer.”

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Soaring Demand

Throughout California, the system of 109 community colleges serves nearly 3 million students, both full and part time. Schwarzenegger’s budget proposed an increase of about $274 million for the year, including funding for an enrollment boost of about 3%.

That is intended partly to pay for those students -- about 7,000 -- who are eligible for UC or Cal State campuses but under the governor’s plan would be redirected to community colleges and as an incentive have their fees at the two-year schools waived.

But Drummond, the system’s chancellor, and other officials say the funding is likely to fall well short of soaring enrollment demand.

Overall, the two-year schools fared better in the latest budget than their university counterparts, Drummond said. But for many years, he noted, they have fared worse.

“We got a little respite this time and we are tremendously grateful for that, but the effects already have been severe,” he said.

In a recent report, his office estimated that fee hikes and course cutbacks this school year caused as many as 175,000 actual and prospective community college students to drop out or not enroll.

Although some have questioned the report’s methodology -- it was based on population trends as well as hard figures -- Drummond said it is clear that thousands of students have stayed away.

At East L.A. College’s bustling learning assistance center, director Maria Elena Yepes said her budget has been reduced by a third this year, to $100,000. That has forced Yepes to cut the center’s hours and tutoring staff. About 6,000 students use the center’s computers and tutoring each semester, she said.

“How are we going to ensure that students get what they need to keep going?” Yepes lamented. “It’s like the holes in the net are so big now that we’re going to see more and more students drop out.”

This year, budget cuts also have forced the college’s main library to adopt shorter hours, including the loss of all Saturday hours, a significant hardship for working students, said head librarian Choonhee Rhim.

Rhim also said has seen her book budget chopped from $50,000 to $18,000 this year.

“We are suffering and the students are suffering,” she said. “Now, we’re just trying to keep the basic operation going. There’s not much more we can do.”