Fees or Tuition? Control of State Colleges at Stake

It looks like tuition. It fits the definition of tuition. And to the university students or their families who pay it, it certainly feels like tuition.

Yet the state of California steadfastly refuses to use the dreaded “T” word to describe the thousands of dollars it charges residents to attend University of California or the California State University campuses. By law, these charges are merely “fees.”

This may seem like a silly little word game, but it is not.

The question of whether to call the fast-rising tab fees or tuition , say lawmakers and college officials, underscores the political struggle over who should control funding for colleges. It is also about the power of language and California’s deep cultural agony over reconciling its pewter future with a golden past.

To a growing chorus of fiscal realists, state officials who insist on using the word fee in reference to the spiraling costs of attending a public university are in deep denial, unwilling to admit today’s harsh fiscal reality and desperately clinging to the notion of California as a land of limitless educational opportunity.

“It strikes me as dysfunctional,” said Cal State Chancellor Barry Munitz, who favors the change of nomenclature for “truth in advertising” by the state.

“In these days when everybody is concerned about being honest with consumers, in effect we’re forced into being dishonest,” he said.

Traditionalists, meanwhile, accuse Munitz and others who prefer to use tuition of breaking faith with California citizens--and perhaps using the state’s economic woes as an excuse to gain more budgetary control and further raise student charges.

“It’s not about semantics,” said Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica), who opposes the move to tuition and has attacked escalating university fees in his maverick gubernatorial campaign. “It’s about soul. It’s the soul of the university disguised as a word game.”

To both sides, the soul in peril--or already lost, depending on who is talking--is the 125-year-old promise that any California resident who wants to can go to college without paying tuition.

Lawmakers first struck this bargain with the people in 1868, when the Legislature created the University of California and declared that “admission and tuition shall be free to all residents.” The ideal was further refined in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education, which established California’s three-tiered college system of today.

State law and policy define tuition as the “direct cost” of college instruction--money for faculty salaries, classrooms, equipment, supplies. Over the years, lawmakers have paid these costs with huge appropriations, opening doors for the poorest of students. The return on the public investment: an economy that prospered from a steady stream of educated employees.

Students began paying fees in 1921, when UC imposed its first annual charge of $50 to cover “incidental” expenses. The fees grew gradually over the years, but even when they broke $1,200 at UC and $600 at Cal State during the 1980s, state officials said they were keeping the tuition-free promise because student money was used only for non-instructional needs such as dormitories, health clinics, athletics and cultural activities.

This distinction was also enshrined in state law, which pointedly refers to the student charges as fees. Except for an obscure 1977 statute allowing Cal State to collect $25 a year in tuition from each student, the law expressly forbids using fees for instruction.

And that has been the rub. Fee wars have been fought over what exactly constitutes an incidental cost. Students cried foul in the early 1980s when budget cuts prompted UC to use a new definition allowing the university to divert fee money to help pay for the registrar, financial aid and admissions offices on campuses.

But most fee watchers argue that it has been just in the last four years, as the state belly-flopped into its worst recession since the Great Depression, that lawmakers and college officials crossed the historic T line with both feet as they scrambled to make up for substantial legislative budget cuts.

Student fees have doubled at Cal State and increased 130% at UC since 1989. In UC’s case, the increases have been so dramatic that the relative student cost has jumped since 1990 from 19th to fifth among the nation’s top 23 public research institutions, according to a recent survey.

In addition, Cal State officials have used millions of dollars in student fees during the past two years to offer about 6,500 courses that otherwise would have been axed.

More important, both systems have gone on record vowing to begin using student fees to pay directly for instruction. Cal State trustees adopted a policy in March, 1933, pegging fees at a third of the cost of instruction.

And in January, the UC Board of Regents approved language that, for the first time, allowed fees to be used to “fund all costs related to instruction, including faculty salaries.” They also voted to charge an extra $620 to undergraduates next fall, a $2,000 differential to students entering five professional schools and $6,000 extra to anyone who earns a duplicate degree.

Yet it remains official university policy to use the word fees, something UC President Jack Peltason admits makes him “stutter.”

“It is tuition,” Peltason conceded at a recent lunch with Times editorial writers, “but by calling it tuition . . . we kind of shut the door on the debate and say, ‘Yes, the students will pay the cost of instruction. . . .’

“We’re not being hypocritical, we are just not prepared to say we’ve crossed that (line) and we can’t come back,” Peltason said.

Such Orwellian logic, one expert contends, is part of a self-deception born of fear and the desire to hold back a sea change in higher education.

“This part of the social contract has been over for a while, but to admit that the state has reneged on the tuition-free commitment is breaking some ties that have bound the society together since the state was formed,” said Kurt Knudsen, policy analyst for the California Research Bureau in Sacramento.

If that is true, lawmakers show no willingness to admit it. Last year, they chewed up a bill sponsored by the California Postsecondary Education Commission, a state agency focused on higher education, to lift the prohibitions against using student fees for instruction.

Without using the word tuition, the measure would have capped student charges for Cal State at 30% of instructional costs and UC charges at 40%. But the bill never made it through the first Senate committee.

Meanwhile, lawmakers passed budget language encouraging Cal State in particular to divert student fees for the restoration of classes. Underscoring what others have called a charade, commission Executive Director Warren Fox quipped, “We did it practically but not legally.”

The reason, say some lawmakers, is that swallowing tuition as a policy would surrender some budgetary power to college officials, who could automatically increase student charges. The Legislature’s historic obligation to pay tuition also gives it control.

“The worst part of this is that for the first time, tuition is used to pay for faculty salaries,” said Hayden, speaking specifically about the new UC policy. “So now the faculty has a vested interest in pushing tuition up in order to guarantee their own salaries.”

Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles), chair of the Assembly Higher Education Committee, said that “at some point, we’re going to have to bite the bullet and recognize that we’re going to have to charge tuition.”

But the paradigm shift will come only after college officials are more forthcoming about how they spend the money and are willing to guarantee results, she said.

“Let me say this straight out: I don’t think there are 10 members of the Legislature who know the difference between tuition and fees,” she said. “Most members of this Legislature are concerned about the rapidly escalating costs to students and they want to know why it is . . . the institutions are finding money for whatever they want to do.

“If students are going to pay . . . can they expect to graduate in four years because there are courses available? Can they expect that students have adequate parking, classrooms, financial aid?”

That is precisely the point, said Cal State Chancellor Munitz. “You’ve got to face the tuition issue or at least stop this hypocrisy of barring us to use the fees for student benefit,” he said.

“Right now, we’re in the worst of all worlds. Students are paying more and they’re calling it fees, although technically we can’t direct the payment to where we need it most--the instructional program.”

Munitz said people privately approach him about the fee-versus-tuition dispute and say, “Thank God that’s on the table, somebody’s got to confront that issue.” Addressing it officially and politically is another thing and Munitz said the key is a California psyche that “doesn’t want to believe the worst.”

“We’ve always been able to see that the next time got better,” he said. “If we admit now that there’s a need for a fundamental change in the way we do business, then in effect we admit that California has lost the ability to recover.”

Is It Tuition?

Neither the University of California nor the Cal State University system collects formal tuition. But as shown below, annual student fees have risen sharply.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Year: Average fees for nine campuses 1921: $50 1955: $84 1968: $331 1972: $644 1981: $997 1989: $1,634 1991: $2,486 1992: $3,044 1993: $3,727 1994: $4,347 (proposed) *

CAL STATE UNIVERSITY Year: Statewide fees 1963: $67 1974: $144 1981: $252 1982: $430 1983: $612 1989: $708 1991: $936 1992: $1,308 1993: $1,440 1994: $1,782 (proposed) Note: Cal State amounts do not include individual campus fees.

Sources: Governor’s budget analysis, Cal State, UC, and UC Student Assn.