Cal State Educations: Still a Good Deal

The California State University Board of Trustees made the right decision last week when it voted to raise the pay of Chancellor Barry Munitz and 22 other CSU officials.

The salary of Munitz--whose achievements over the years certainly merit his 8.6% increase--will rise to $190,008, and his deferred compensation will double to $20,000 a year. He says he will donate most of the increase to a scholarship program for inner-city youngsters.

Six campus presidents got 5% increases, 12 got 2.5% and four got none. Their pay range is $120,288 to $153,660. Four other executives received salary increases ranging to 12%.

Politically, the announcement of the raises was badly timed, coming on the same day as the announcement that student fees will be increased 10% next fall.

The administrators, many of whom have had no raises in recent years, deserve to be compensated in line with the important jobs they hold. Munitz and the CSU board must enter the higher-education marketplace to find qualified academics and administrators--a very competitive field. Part of winning this talent competition, they note, is offering better pay, which is to say offering more California taxpayer dollars and more student fee dollars.

Unfortunately, because of politics and California’s fiscal realities, the cost of quality education is increasingly falling on students. The CSU board says that without help from Sacramento, it will have to increase fees to $1,740 next fall from the current $1,584. No assistance from the state is foreseen. If the figure is not to increase even more, the budget architects in Sacramento will have to come through.

But even at $1,740, CSU students will be getting a good deal. The California Post-Secondary Education Commission’s report on so-called “comprehensive” or non-research universities found that CSU fees were in the bottom quartile nationally among comparable schools. Even with the newly announced increase, CSU will be charging less than such schools as, say, Arizona State and Rutgers.

It would not be fair to attribute the student fee increase solely to the higher pay for college executives, even though the board action last week seemed to invite that linkage. It’s true that student money helps pay administrators, but it’s also true that it goes to pay for talented professors, grants for poor students and equipment such as library books and com-puters.

If Californians expect top-flight universities run by first-class administrative and academic talent, they are going to have to pay for them. It’s a fact of economic life--basic, simple and inescapable. And it’s a fact that those in Sacramento who control the state’s purse strings would do well to remember.