For various student movements working over the past four years to fight quickly rising college fees, the U.S. Constitution offers an instructive lesson.
“Every bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a law, be presented to the President of the United States,” states Section 7 of Article I, laying out the foundation for the presidential veto authority.
However, just a paragraph later, the document rejoins: “Every order, resolution or vote” shall also go to the president.
The reason, of course, is that the framers understood incentives: By requiring the president to approve every “bill,” the rules would simply drive the legislative branch to create new words to describe their directives, and argue that these did not similarly need presidential consent.
A quick historical look at UC fee policy can be explained in much the same way. In 1960, the state’s much praised Master Plan for Higher Education recommended that “the University of California shall be tuition free to all residents of the state.” And indeed, it has been.
The trick, strictly speaking, is that none of the fees you pay are “tuition;” most of them are the so-called “education fee,” which is supposedly much different. For students paying the bills though, it seems like the change in name has had little practical effect.
In much the same way, when individual UC campuses need more money than they can rake in from the student-fee levels set by the university’s Board of Regents, they create new ones. Each campus, for example, charges a flurry of their own local fees — the registration fee, controlled at UCSD by Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Joseph W. Watson, being the school’s biggest.
When the state cuts funding, and administrators can’t raise systemwide student charges to compensate, they simply change the rules, forcing students to pay for new buildings and athletic facilities and pawning onto student government the responsibility for funding essential services.
Which brings me to my sad conclusion: No sustained campaign to pressure the regents into halting fee increases will work. The university needs a certain amount of money to operate, and it will raise that money no matter what restrictions are placed on it; in most circumstances, it will find a way of passing the costs on to students.
Over and over again, the failure of student efforts to keep fees from rising makes this clear. Two years ago, for example, a group of professional students sued the UC system in a class action lawsuit, charging that unexpected fee hikes approved in response to the state’s budget crisis represented a breach of contract; earlier this year, they actually won, and the university was ordered to repay millions.
However, the university’s response was not to bite the bullet, reduce compensation for overpaid executives (think: Chancellor Marye Anne Fox’s undisclosed perks) and to tighten its belt; instead, it simply introduced a new fee for current students, to repay the judgment to previous ones.
Given that state funding for the university will not rise by much in the near decade and is largely unaffected by student lobbying (no matter what the UC Student Association claims), the other consequence of fee limits, like the ones included in Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s budget “compact” with the state’s universities, is that they drive campuses to the two remaining revenue sources: private donations and research grants. Though less directly visible, this trend has a consequence on not only students, but all of society.
When the state and the students give the university money, the system can spend the funds largely as it sees fit, like hiring professors that can contribute to the general wealth of public knowledge. Both private and research funds come with many more strings attached.
Though San Diego Padres owner and UC Regent John Moore gives handsomely to cancer research, he seems to have little interest in fighting malaria, for example, even though the latter kills many more people each year. The result: UCSD has the Moores Cancer Center, not a Moores Malaria Center. Federal grants similarly satisfy the political priorities of whatever party is currently in power.
In the end, it’s far from clear that the consequences of making public universities subject to the whims of the highest bidder are better than asking students to pay more.
Next year, as California’s state budget dips again into the red, the student-fee tango will start again: The regents will propose higher fees, the UCSA will protest loudly (and ask for higher membership dues, to help “fight on behalf of the students”) and the fees will go up. Unlike the U.S. president, you see, students have no effective veto.
