Charge Peter to Educate Paul and Guarantee Fairness to All : * College aid: The UC affordability model would raise fees for wealthier students to bolster financial aid cofers.

Like the endless sunny weather, Californians have come to expect extraordinarily low fees from their state universities. When the state’s economy was booming and funding for higher education was plentiful, parents could send their children to a University of California campus for a few hundred dollars a year beyond the cost of room and board.

Those golden days appear to be gone forever. With California’s economy growing at a slower pace, many worthy programs, including the UC system, are competing for a reasonable share of a highly restricted state budget. There seems little prospect that increased state funding will permit a rollback to very low fees.

Confronted with this new fiscal reality, UC’s goal must be to ensure that the universities remain affordable for future generations of Californians while preserving high academic quality.

UC has responded by developing an affordability model, which has been endorsed by the chancellors of all nine campuses. The model establishes a formula to guarantee that college costs will remain within the reach of each qualified student. But what’s important to understand is that the model can work only if UC is permitted to increase enrollment fees at a reasonable rate. Here’s how the two seemingly conflicting concepts--affordability and increased fees-- are connected.

The model pledges that the amount of money from savings, work earnings and loans that a student and family must contribute will remain within a reasonable and predictable dollar range for all students who qualify for need-based financial aid (about 50% of UC undergraduates). Students will not have to work so many hours that it detracts from their education or borrow so much that repayment unduly restricts their lifestyles and career choices after graduation. For this promise to be real, students must be assured of receiving sufficient grant money in addition to the money they contribute themselves. That grant money comes from many sources: federal, state, private scholarships and UC itself.

The model also takes into account the cost of attendance beyond enrollment fees: housing, food, books and other expenses.

The big question is: How do we make sure there is enough grant money available to keep students’ work and loan contributions manageable? Unfortunately, the federal and state governments are not likely to increase grant aid; in fact, funding from these sources may be diminished.

The necessary solution is to ask students from wealthier families to pay more. A bigger chunk of the fees all students pay will be returned through financial aid, providing the grant dollars necessary to support low- and middle-income students. For the 1996-97 school year, UC proposes a 7.1% increase in fees; 33% or more would be channeled back into financial aid for needy students.

It is important to remember that no California student, even one from a wealthy family, pays the full cost of a UC education. In 1993-94, it cost UC $12,500 to educate each undergraduate. In-state students paid about $4,000 of that total, and the state subsidized $8,500. Although this public education bargain will continue, those families with the greatest ability to pay will be asked to fund a larger share of the costs of a UC education.

Some argue that only very low enrollment fees can maintain access for all students. But the fact is that without fee increases, the funding pool for financial aid cannot grow and the university has no means of helping low- and middle-income students offset the rising costs of housing, books and other expenses.

Our analysis shows that raising fees to provide more financial aid works. In spite of relatively steep fee increases over the past five years, UC and UCLA are enrolling the neediest undergraduate student bodies in history. Of UCLA’s 1994 freshmen class, 34.5% come from families who could contribute no more than $2,000 to the annual bill of about $12,500 that includes room, board and other expenses in addition to enrollment fees. And 22.1% have families who can contribute nothing at all.

But higher fees will not, and should not, be the only source of funds upon which UC relies. By improving operating efficiencies, we have adjusted to cuts of more than 20% since 1990 in the state-funded portion of our budget. And we will be aggressively pursuing private funds to develop an endowment to significantly augment our financial aid pool.

With the era of low fees gone forever, the affordability model permits UC to ensure access without eroding academic quality. That quality, after all, is the primary reason so many students choose UC in the first place. A populist approach of those able to afford it paying more may not be universally welcome, but it presents the fairest and most reliable means to finance high-quality public higher education in California while maintaining access for all eligible students.