State Tuition Hike Heads To Final Vote
Sacramento, CA — A tuition hike for the 10 University of California schools, approved today by a governing board committee will go before the full Board of Regents Thursday.
Governor Jerry Brown, who also plans to attend the Board of Regents meeting, was a member of the committee that reviewed the move. He and a student regent dissented as the committee voted 7 to 2 to approve UC President Janet Napolitano’s recommendation for the increase, which would raise tuition in each of the next five years. Tuition rates have been frozen for three years and Napolitano says that insufficient state funding makes the increases necessary to protect the quality of education.
Under the proposed plan, the average annual cost of a UC education for California residents would go up $612, to $12,804 next fall, and to $15,564 by the fall of 2019.
Before the vote, Brown called for a task force to look at ways of restructuring the education system to educate more students in less time through online learning, transfer and completion routes for community college students, among other options. While Napolitano says she is open to new ideas, she does not think the system has time to implement a new task force.
Before the meeting, student protesters, attempting to block members of the governing board as they tried to enter the conference center at the University of California, Mission Bay, were pushed back behind barricades by university police.
