Schwarzenegger Pushing to Raise College Fees 10% to 44%

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger plans to propose a 10% fee increase for Californians attending college at the University of California and California State University and a fee hike of up to 40% for graduate students at the universities, sources familiar with the governor’s budget said Wednesday.

At the same time, the budget is expected to contain reductions in college financial aid for students from moderate-income families.

Diana Fuentes-Michel, executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, said she expects the governor’s proposal to tighten qualifications for Cal Grants, the state’s main financial aid program.

The move likely would eliminate financial aid for some students by lowering the ceiling used to determine which families are eligible for aid. Currently, students from a family of four are eligible for aid if the family income is no more than $66,700. Fuentes-Michel said she expects the maximum size of the Cal Grant awards -- which currently range from $1,551 for community college students to $9,700 a year for students attending private universities -- to remain unchanged, but that reductions are possible there as well. The cost of the program has increased rapidly in recent years.

Any fee hikes for the UC and CSU systems would come on top of increases for undergraduate and graduate students in the past 13 months of about 40% -- the steepest fee hikes in state history.

Both university systems raised undergraduate student fees by 30% before the current fall term began, a jump that followed a rise of 10% to 15% for undergraduate and graduate students, respectively, in December 2002.

For professional school students, those same December fee increases ranged from 19% to 26%.

The governor’s budget is not expected to provide better news for the state’s community college students. Officials at the two-year colleges have said they are preparing for the governor to propose raising fees from $18 to $26 per credit, a 44% increase.

That move would follow a fee increase last year for community college students, from $11 to $18 a credit. The state’s budget crisis also has forced the colleges to cut course offerings significantly in that time period, with more students crowding into the remaining classes.

Even with the fee increases Schwarzenegger is expected to propose, UC and Cal State fees for undergraduates who are residents of California would be lower than the average of comparable public universities in other states.

For Cal State schools, systemwide fees for undergraduate students who are California residents stand at $2,572 for the current year. A 10% increase would add $257 to the total. Individual campuses add additional fees to the systemwide figure. Cal State’s 23 campuses have 410,000 students, primarily undergraduates.

At UC, undergraduate students who are California residents now pay mandatory systemwide fees totaling $4,984. Campuses also charge miscellaneous fees, which boost the total average fees for an undergraduate to about $5,530.

Graduate students who are California residents now pay systemwide fees at UC of about $5,200; with campus fees included, that figure rises to $6,843 for average total fees.

Students attending UC law, medicine and business schools pay substantially higher fees. To attend the UCLA law school, for example, a California resident now pays $17,011.

The budget Schwarzenegger will present Friday also is expected to call for a 20% rise in tuition for non-resident students at the two public university systems, according to sources familiar with the governor’s spending plan.

Students who are not California residents currently pay $19,740 per year in UC tuition. Graduate student tuition for nonresidents is now $19,333. At the UCLA law school, tuition for nonresidents $29,256.

For the 2002-03 academic year, the UC campuses had around 192,000 students -- about 148,000 undergraduates and 44,000 graduate students.

In his State of the State address Tuesday, Schwarzenegger proposed capping annual student fee increases for the state’s university systems at 10%, but did not specify whether he was referring to undergraduate or graduate students.

In his speech, the governor spoke of the necessity of ending what he described as the “boom-and-bust cycle of wildly fluctuating fees with a predictable, capped fee policy” for college students.

“And we must limit fee increases to no more than 10% a year,” Schwarzenegger said. “Like our kindergarten through 12th grade schools, our colleges and universities must also share the burden of the fiscal crisis.”

Late Wednesday, a spokesman for the Department of Finance said Schwarzenegger was referring only to undergraduate students when he proposed a cap on university fee increases.

“The governor’s comment in the State of the State speech was in regard to undergraduate fees,” Palmer said.

Palmer would not confirm the amount of the increases for graduate students and non-residents, saying they would be disclosed when the budget is released on Friday. But another source said: “At the graduate level, they are recommending a very big increase, like in the neighborhood of 40%.”

Fee increases for graduate and professional schools have generally been less politically sensitive than increases for undergraduates.

UC and CSU officials declined to comment late Wednesday on the governor’s proposed fee increases. The two system’s governing boards ultimately set the actual fees that students pay, based on the level of state funding provided by the governor and the Legislature.

Schwarzenegger already has made midyear reductions of $53.6 million to the two university systems.

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Rabin reported from Sacramento, Trounson and Silverstein from Los Angeles.