Budget cuts are starting to tighten the screws at colleges and universities in California and Washington. Washington’s governor, Christine Gregoire, is fortunately leaving K-12 funding alone, but the public colleges and universities have been asked to either freeze or cut back on hiring, travel, equipment purchases and personal service contracts. That will save an estimated $36 million.
California’s State University system includes 23 campuses, over 450,000 students and 47,000 faculty and staff. That is a phenomenal amount of education going on. And that’s just the CSU system, which is totally separate from the UC system—they get cranky when people assume they are in any way related to one another, and they do not like it when students want to transfer between the two (as I discovered when I tried to transfer from CSUF to UCD).
With this year’s and last year’s budget cuts, the CSU system stands to lose as much as $600 million in state funding. The Cal State trustees had a big meeting and decided that the only way to deal with the huge number of students and the luck of funding would be to cut enrollment by 10,000 next year.
The policy will allow each campus to turn away students who in the past would have qualified for admission.
Campus presidents were overwhelmingly supportive of the move, which came as California prepares for what could be its largest group of graduating high-school seniors. Colleges increasingly have had trouble handling demand without adequate funding, said Stephen Weber, San Diego State’s president.
“What we have been involved in is literally academic fraud,” he said. “We have brought people and have not been able to provide the (courses) they need. That fraud catches up to us.”
Students and faculty also voiced support, saying the university should do whatever is necessary to preserve the value of a Cal State degree.
You have to respect any administrator who’s man enough to admit the situation is flawed and needs to be dealt with. Overcrowding means students don’t get into the classes they need and it becomes less and less possible to finish in four years. And while college is a lovely place to spend five years, the outrageous tuition costs make that option a nonviable one.
