Guest Commentary
by Brian Brady
UC-Davis students are being pepper sprayed for chalking protests to tuition increases. At UC Berkeley, guns were drawn and billy clubs were used on the protesting students. While the media attributed this use of violence to Republicans’ resistance to tax cuts, The OC Register finally had the courage to discuss the root cause of the problem: Professors’ pension costs are driving up tuition fees in the UC system.
The UC system, including medical centers and national laboratories, is scrambling to shore up its pension fund as it prepares for a wave of retirements and tackles a roughly $10 billion unfunded liability. The UC Retirement Plan’s huge deficit was created by investment losses during the global economic crisis – and the nearly two decades when campuses, employees and the state did not contribute any money toward pensions.
In addition to complete fiscal irresponsibility, the free-riders in the UC professorial corps are demographically challenged. Many are exiting the halls of academia to cash in on the retirement bonanza before the piper calls. What is the solution which the professorial corps suggests ? Get the State to contribute to their Cadillac pension and health care plans:
UC officials want the state to make pension contributions, as it does for the California State University and California Community Colleges systems. But the state, facing its own financial problems, hasn’t provided money for UC pensions for more than 20 years.
This amounts to nothing more than a subsidy, from poor people, to the upper-middle class. The UC system is now a haven for the upper-middle -class and foreign students rather than working class California kids. I dont think this is what Thomas Jeferson had in mind when he discussed public funding of education.
Why does college cost so much? Pell grants and an expanded student loan program introduced monopoly money to a system which prided itself on “service to a noble cause”. Faced with such largesse, the professorial corps accelerated tenure, expanded compensation, and padded benefits, creating a career out of what could have been noble service, from accomplished people, at the apex of their other careers. Careerism then, was a byproduct of the introduction of a distorted market.
My father attended La Salle College, for about $500/year, in the late ’50s. He was able to pay for his education each summer by working on a delivery truck. The Christian Brothers worked hard to deliver a quality education, for the son of an immigrant milkman, by drawing upon the accomplished graduates’ sense of Noblesse Oblige. In short, the Christian Brothers and retired (and returning) graduates saw value to ensuring that poor kids received a quality education. They didn’t do it for the pension.
By the time I matriculated, at a university not unlike my father’s, tuition costs had risen some 600% (over a 28-year period). Today (28 years later), those tuition costs have risen another 600%. My father was able to fund his education from summer work. I was able to fund mine with summer work and small student loans. Today, college students must encumber themselves into a six-figure debt to earn a college degree. Is it any wonder that, in the middle of each 28-year period, a major federal education subsidy was introduced?
What’s the solution for the UC system?
- Reform the professorial corps’ pensions, health care plans, and compensation
- Reverse the “easy tenure” policies which have created complacency in the professorial corps and open full professor positions to competition.
- Encourage more part-time professors, with real private sector experience, rather than careerists from academia. Students will learn more from practitioners than theoriticians.
- Remove access to Pell grants and student loans for publicly-funded universities (that’s double taxation). Offer more work-study opportunities, internships with the private-sector, and drive tution costs down by making UC, Cal-State, and JC schools compete on price.
If you’re a frustrated high school graduate, who is finding it hard to attend college this fall because of costs, you would do well to stop berating your neighbors for refusing to pay more in taxes. The real reason you can’t attend college this fall is that the professorial corps screwed up their retirement and health care plans…
…so you just gotta pay more
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Brian Brady is a small business owner who lives in Solana Beach. He is a director for Stop Taxing Us, the taxpayer advocacy and tea party group. There, he crafted the “Promise to California taxpayers,” a no new tax pledge candidates make. He is a Member-Elect of the SDGOP Central Committee.
Comments 8
California, a destitute state, still gives away college education at fire sale prices. Our community college tuition is the lowest in the nation. How low? Nationwide, the average community college tuition is about three times higher than California CC’s. http://www.hecb.wa.gov/research/issues/documents/TuitionandFees2009-10Report-Final.pdf
Chart 5 on page 8
This ridiculously low tuition devalues education to students – resulting in a 30+% drop rate for class completion. In addition, 2/3 of California CC students pay no net tuition at all – either filling out a simple unverified “hardship” form that exempts them from any tuition payment, or receiving grants and tax credits for their full tuition. http://tinyurl.com/ygqz9ls
On top of that, California offers thousands of absolutely free adult continuing education classes – a sop to the upper middle class. In San Diego, over 1,400 classes for everything from baking pastries to ballroom dancing are offered totally at taxpayer expense. http://www.sdce.edu
Protests about increased UC student fees too often ignore one crucial point — all poor and many middle class students don’t pay the “fees” (our state’s euphemism for tuition). There are no fees for most California families with under $80K income. Moreover, Pell Grants and federal tuition tax credits covered the total 2009-10 fee increases for nearly 3/4 of all undergraduates with household incomes below $180K.
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/blueandgold/
and
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/article/22415
A few responses from an academic point of view.
– Getting tenure is not that easy at most places. I’m curious to know what this “easy tenure” policy is and why it hasn’t reached the ears of academic job-seekers (who I’m sure would knock down the door to get to these places where tenure was easy). And full professorship is still very hard to get–I personally know of a number of top associate profs who haven’t yet been able to get over the full hurdle.
– The real problems at the universities aren’t the professors. Yes, there are some deadwoods and crazies; those are a pretty small percentage though and most profs actually do teach or bring in research $$. The real problem is with the massive recent expansion of admin and staff for all sorts of unneeded bureaucracies on campus (although to be fair a decent number of those are mandated by the politicos and lawyers thanks to CA’s litigation-happy environment). See this very comprehensive website on the costs of the absurd increases in admin: http://www.uclafaculty.org/FASite/Admin._Growth.html
– Compared to other states, California’s public universities actually do a pretty darn good job of serving poorer students. See: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked-schools
– I partially agree with Richard; tuition is too low, but the key is that i needs to vary with the institution instead of being stuck to an overall rate. Tuition should be allowed to vary with demand and costs so that places like Berkeley can charge closer to a market value for their education. No more pretending that all the UCs (or CCs) are the same.
– While they may not have to pay as much in tuition, many poorer students do work on campus to pay for their room and board, both of which have skyrocketed in cost as admins focus on building more massive monuments to wasteful spending and appeasing powerful labor unions. http://californiawatch.org/node/15273
tl;dr: The admins are the real problem. And they’re the ones most ensconced in power and budget control.
“I partially agree with Richard; tuition is too low, but the key is that i needs to vary with the institution instead of being stuck to an overall rate ”
Agreed. That was my last point.
I disagree with your claim that poor California students are being served well. The data suggest that a growing number of UC students are consistently being drawn from upper-middle class and foreign families…and I”m okay with that if the market is dictating it. Altruistic alumni might set up scholarships to specifically fund poor students.
I don’t disagree with the admin problem but frankly the professors are the source of the problem . The 1979 HEERA law codified collective bargaining . Today, there are 16 unions representing 73,000 UC employees and the faculty union. Labor unions are so ensconced in the culture that graduate students, who work as tutors, are required to join the the United Auto Workers (as if that makes any sense at all)
Who lobbied for HEERA? The professors, starting at (where else?) Berkeley, then UCLA, then all the UC campuses.
Chris, I don’t want to talk past one another because I think you, Richard, and I agree on the solution: more market, less force.
If you want to see the likely free market price of professors, consider what our cc’s and SDSU pay for “freeway profs.” These itinerants are hired by the class.
I don’t know the current figures, but it’s ROUGHLY $7,000 per class — $35,000 for teaching a “full” five course load. I don’t think there are any benefits — and certainly no tenure. One is hired and retained strictly on performance and the needs of the college
I don’t think there is any shortage of such profs — at least in the liberal arts. In the technical and science fields, as Chris mentioned concerning tuition, there is no reason all profs should be paid the same — though that’s the public employee mentality.
Even the hidebound military learned long ago to pay different amounts for different skills (primarily with reenlistment bonuses). No reason our colleges could not do the same — except for faculty.
As for the shortage of classes under this fiscal crunch, it’s largely related to the fact that the cc’s let the freeway profs go, choosing to retain their overpriced, underperforming tenured faculty.
In essence, a freeway prof works for less than a THIRD what a tenured professor costs (counting benefits). If the colleges decided their primary goal was to provide “service (classes) to the students, they would have reduced the tenured positions. Obviously, these institutions are run primarily for the union employees rather than the public — just like every other public agency in California.
OOPS! I wrote that traveling profs received “one third” what professors were paid (including benefits). Actually it’s about one HALF the cost. My bad.
The problem is that the teaching quality you’re going to get with the ‘traveling’ (also called adjunct) professors is going to be much lower than tenured profs. The best professors (researchers as well as teachers) gravitate towards tenure track jobs and most view adjuncting, if they do it, as a stepping stone, not a career. This leads to high levels of turnover, less investment in the institution itself (say, in advising students), and lower quality education for the students.
After all, you might as well just teach high school for higher salary and benefits rather than adjunct (again, market mechanisms at work!). Plus, there’s the fun matter of political witch-hunting that many adjuncts suffer through without the protection of tenure (http://thefire.org/article/9740.html).
But you’re right that tenure-track jobs often place too much emphasis on research (often of questionable utility; see http://chronicle.com/article/The-Research-Bust/129930/ ) with little to no emphasis on teaching (which the public, rightly so, considers the primary mission of universities). This leads to a conundrum: the best aspiring professors place their emphasis on seemingly arcane research work and avoid teaching because the academic job market uses research rather than teaching as a mark of quality (and, not coincidentally, so do the ranking services like usnews).
An interesting solution that I’ve seen tried out at a few places is to have a sort of tenure-track for non-research professors. In exchange for agreeing to higher teaching and service requirements and subject to a long probationary period like pre-tenured professors, professors then get similar benefits to tenure in job security. This seems like a good win-win for everyone.
Finally, a word about the utility of tenure. The prospect of tenure is basically a necessity from a conservative standpoint because it provides protection in an often highly politically charged atmosphere for both teaching and research that goes against the grain. Without that light at the end of the tunnel, I doubt any conservative grad students would even bother trying to make a dent in academia.
Good discussion with both of y’all though–would be happy to grab a drink and discuss higher ed reform.
Actually Chris, the tenure system with the tenured faculty essentially picking the profs has been the biggest impediment to conservatives teaching in academia. While colleges give much lip service to diversity, that does NOT include diversity of thought. Few would argue that conservatives are not discriminated against on today’s campuses — as both students and teachers.
Furthermore, too may tenured professors have no incentive to teach, or to teach well. They can shirk such pedestrian activities, and too often do.
Because tenure ensures lifetime employment, liberals have become ferocious about keeping limited government types from receiving tenure. It is now a semi-closed progressive system, poisoning our young at great taxpayer and parental expense.
Indeed, most people who go into academia as a career have nothing but disdain for competition and meritocracy. Often that disdain is exactly why they are drawn to the academic life. While feuding and petty jealousies are common, real competition is a foreign concept — and almost universally condemned by today’s professors.
Tenure makes no more sense in college than it does in kindergarten, or in the office, for that matter. It’s an antiquated concept developed centuries ago to protect against infringements on academic freedom by the church. We understand that union seniority hiring and firing harms K-12 school kids — it’s really no different in the colleges.
BTW, teaching college is FAR easier than teaching minors in K-12 — and thus merits lower pay. There are no collegiate disciplinary problems. NO parents to deal with. There is no myriad number of secondary subjects that must be taught — from brushing teeth to proper use of a condom.
Stress is minor at best for a college instructor (aside from the work load, at times — the problem ANY nonunion worker faces). College is a volitional relationship between teachers and students — as opposed to the compulsory education of our underage children.
To the extent that adjunct professors don’t fulfill their obligations, that is a MANAGEMENT problem of school administrations not used to such responsibilities — having dealt with tenured professors for so long. I doubt it’s much of a management problem in private schools — especially the newer, more innovative schools using more online learning, etc.
The minor good news in today’s recession is that fewer and fewer tenured positions are offered — especially in community colleges. Necessity can be the mother of reform.
As a parent of son who will be starting Berkeley at full cost next year, I believe FASFA (federal student aid) is an important contributor to the cost of college. Most schools require parents to complete FASFA and give a complete accounting of income and non-retirement assets. This includes submitting tax returns. The result of FASFA is a government calculation of how much parents are expected to contribute to the students education. This calculation and information is given to each school.
With FASFA every school knows the maximum amount a parent can pay and knows the offer every other school will make using the same financial calculation. In my son’s case, USC, Northwestern, and Boston University all gave exactly the same offer of exactly $42,000 for the parent and a $6000 loan for the student. How is this not price fixing? In what other industry would the government allow competitors to conspire on price?
I expect to contribute to my children’s education but I expect everyone to pay the same school price and I expect the price to be set by the market and competition and not by the government and their FASFA calculation.