"I bet you didn't pay over $200/semester when you when to UCB."
I'll bet I graduated a few months before Raygun was elected governor, and a dozen years before Prop 13 was passed. I graduated in '66, and it was $121/semester. '66-67 was also $240/year, but for 3 quarters, not 2 semesters. After that?
It is California, however, that has become likely the most cited example in the free-tuition debate. Its University of California system was created in 1868 with the decree that “admission and tuition shall be free to all residents of the state,” and the California State and community-college systems followed suit.
But a look at the history of college in California reveals that “free” is not necessarily a simple concept.
When free tuition in its three-tiered system for higher education — community colleges for two-year degrees, Cal State for four-year ones and UC for research — was affirmed by the state’s Master Plan for Higher Education in 1960, the plan did permit “fees.”
According to the Daily Californian, Berkeley’s student newspaper, the system instituted a $150 “educational fee” in 1970. For years following that decision, the state continued to use fee language that avoided calling money from students “tuition,” even as students were charged more money.
The decision to institute fees did not pass unnoticed. Shortly after being elected governor of California in 1966, Ronald Reagan proposed a tuition, a 10% cut from state funding and the firing of UC President Clark Kerr, who stood by students who were protesting rising costs. “We have to push Reagan right back to the wall,” Bettina Aptheker, a lead protester at the Berkeley campus, told theChristian Science Monitor in 1967. “If we have to, we will push him right through the wall.”
(“I wasn’t trying to do him any physical harm,” Aptheker, who is now a professor of feminist studies at University of California Santa Cruz, jokes today. “I was just trying to remove him from office.”)
Amid similar protests over freedom of speech, the Vietnam War and the draft, Reagan “demonized the students’ protests,” Aptheker says. In 1966, for example, at a speech in which he condemned protesters as “a small minority of beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates,” Reagan, then a candidate for governor, said he wouldn’t cut state education spending but “complained of the costs of welfare programs,” according to the New York Times’ archives.
Despite the protests, the state began to move down a path of gradually pulling money out of higher education, going from funding 32% of the UC budget in 1974 to 16% for the 2004-05 school year, according to the Daily Californian. Meanwhile, the state’s Proposition 13 was approved in 1978 on a wave of anti-tax sentiment, limiting property taxes.
It was soon clear that, despite the UC system’s foundations in the 19th century and the 1960 master plan, the landscape had changed: There was less money to go around in California and thus less willingness to fund all the government programs of yesteryear. No academic ivory tower could shield the UC system from the new political and economic reality, and by the 2012-13 school year, tuition had become the school’s biggest source of “core operating funds,” the Berkeley paper said....
...“If you look at the actual statistics, you will see that the state of California has spent more on prisons and prison construction than it has spent on all education, K-12 and all the university systems in the state, for years,” she explains, noting that the Golden State, extoled for education during the tuition-free era, has slipped to near bottom in some rankings.
time.com |
