Changing Universities

One of the main questions presented at the last UC regents meeting was why do only 60% of UC students graduate in four years. While President Yudof celebrated this rate, Governor Brown was not very pleased, and both men indicated that online education may be the solution to the problem. However, what should be clear is that the university needs to do a comprehensive study to determine the main causes for the different graduation rates on the various campuses.

In my interviews with students, I have found that the biggest reasons for a delay in graduation is that students switch majors, they fail out of courses, they cannot get required courses, they do not qualify for their intended majors, they have to work to pay for their living expenses, they do not think there are any jobs for them after graduation, they pursue double majors, they do not receive adequate advising, they have medical problems and personal issues. Students also complain about the number of requirements for certain majors and their dislike of large lecture classes. A comprehensive survey of the UC system would help to determine what is really happening on a local level.

Another important aspect of this problem is the question of how much money individual campuses dedicate to undergraduate instruction. UCOP has reported on the increase in classes and the decrease in faculty relative to the number of students, but it is still unclear what has caused these changes. After all, during the last five years, while the state did reduce the UC budget by $1 billion, total tuition revenue went up by over $1.2 billion. It would seem that as students pay more for their education, they would get more support and smaller classes instead of less support and larger classes, but as this blog has stressed, the university continues to use undergraduate funds to subsidize many other university functions.

Since President Yudof claims that tuition increases have only covered 38% of state reductions, he has opened the door for the state to argue that tuition can be frozen for the next four years. Once again manipulated budget numbers are coming back to bite the UC. If the UC had instead stated the truth that tuition dollars have outpaced state reductions, it would have been much harder for the governor and the legislature to simply tell the UC to stop raising tuition. While I am not calling for a tuition increase, I am arguing that false and misleading budgetary numbers always seem to backfire on the UC.

Governor Brown’s May revision of the state budget for the University of California makes very few changes. One difference from the January budget is the removal of a cap on how many units students can take and still receive financial aid (Cal Grants). Another change deals with the introduction of accountability measures for UC funding. While the governor’s Department of Finance has released an outline of the accountability measures, the May Revise pulls them pack and states that the governor will work with the legislature to develop the guidelines. The backstory is that during a legislative hearing on higher education, it became clear that there were many problems with the governor’s multi-year proposal to tie funding to a 10% increase in graduation rates for UC and CSU. One major problem is that the CSU 4-year graduation rate is 16%, and the UC 4-year rate is 60%, so the UC would have to increase by 6% and the CSU by 1.6%. Also the legislative analyst pointed out that most multi-year deals between the state and the UC have been broken, and therefore, it is not a good idea to make long-term funding commitments. The LAO also argued that it might be a good idea to first study why people do not graduate in a timely fashion before you start legislating accountability measures.

The question of timely graduation is obviously a major focus of the administration, and that is one reason why the governor and the legislature want to see if online education will move students through the systems in a quicker fashion. While there is no mention of online education in the May Revise, we can assume the governor still intends to earmark $10 million of the UC budget for distance education; however, we still do not know how the governor’s funding for online education relates to Steinberg’s and Marty Block’s distance education bills. To make matters even more complicated, the UC now seems to be running several competing online programs of its own.

While the original UC online pilot program appears to be running out of funding, a new initiative, run out of the Office of the President, is calling for a new round of course proposals. Under the heading of ILTI, this call for proposals concentrates on highly-impacted, lower-division cross-campus courses. The desire here is to develop system-wide classes that would help students graduate in a more efficient manner, but there still remains the major problems of how to allow students from one campus to take courses on another campus. Not only are there issues with incompatible registration systems, but the biggest difficulty is how will revenue be shared between the campuses. For example, if many UCSB students take their Biology classes with UC Davis, who pays for the courses and how much do they pay, and what happens if suddenly, no one at UCSB is taking Biology courses, does the UCSB Biology Department layoff teachers? We have been told that a new working group has been assembled to deal with these issues, but it may take several years.

Another complication in the Online scrum is the fact that individual faculty members are signing up with private providers like Coursera to put their courses online. Meanwhile, departments are developing their own online courses, and some summer programs have augmented their online offerings. No one knows how all of these different online ventures relate to each other and how they relate to the governor’s plans and the various bills coming out of the legislature.

Since no one knows how much it really costs to educate a student in the UC system, it is hard to know if online courses will save money or not. In fact, the governor’s January budget did include some budget transparency language to see how much it costs to educate each student, but the UC does not have to report on this until October 2014. It would make sense to hold off on the accountability measures until after we know how much things actually cost and why students do not graduate in a more timely fashion.

At the National Education Writers Association conference at Stanford last week, MOOCs were the topic of much speculation and debate. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan affirmed that the jury is still out on this new model of instruction, yet he could see the day when the best Algebra teacher in the country would be teaching high school students from around the country online. While it was good to hear that he does not think technology offers the magic bullet for education, some of his comments about MOOCs were concerning. Moreover, as he stressed that the administration’s higher education focus is on increasing access, affordability, and degree completion, he did not offer any new specifics on this front. I later had the opportunity to question him about the president’s college scorecard web site, and he put me in touch with someone to continue the conversation.

During a panel with Daphne Koller of Coursera, I argued that we need to think about the whole higher education system and how these new technological solutions do not deal with the major issues of funding, costs, quality, and academic labor. Koller insisted that people take MOOCs for many different reasons, and the ones who want to complete courses often attain their goal. In response to my concern that faculty are being motivated to sign away their intellectual property to Cousera or to their home institutions, she replied that the she is an advocate of individual freedom so professors should be able to do what they want. I argued that faculty have to think about how their actions affect other people, and in the context of our union contract, we have a collective agreement that some times limits total individual freedom.

The debate over individual freedom versus collective contacts was highlighted in Thomas Friedman’s presentation. He started off by arguing that companies like Google do not want employees with college degrees; rather, what they want is people who have a proven record of mastering certain skills or competencies. Using the analogy of moving from a defined benefit plan to a 401K plan, Friedman said that everything is going to be individualized, and people will cobble together their own degrees and credentials out of a list of available online courses. In this “total revolution,” professors will have to prove their value in a global market as consumers/students are able to learn “anything” from “anyone” at “any time.” This over-generalized rhetoric tends to dominate Freidman’s work and other high-tech evangelists.

A constant theme of this conference was the notion that higher ed institutions are slow to move, but we are in a period of rapid technological transformation. Meanwhile, digital news media outlets have to quickly report on recent events, and so they are more in synch with high-tech businesses that can make quick decisions, and this puts slow-moving deliberative bodies, like public universities, at a disadvantage. Just as newspapers have been transformed by the “Internet Revolution,” we are being told that traditional universities have to give up their attachment to shared governance, job security, and reasoned debate; in this brave new world of high-tech transformation, liberal and conservative power-brokers have seemed to bought into the same push to trade in all past forms of economic and institutional stability in favor of a jump into an unknown future of radical individualism and the privatization of public functions.

The National Education Writers Association conference will be held May 2-4 at Stanford University. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Thomas Freidman will headline, and I will be on a panel discussing MOOCs. My main point will be that the push to use for-profit companies to provide online education at public institutions can be best understood by looking at for-profit universities. Institutions like the University of Phoenix receive the vast majority of their funding from the federal government through student loans and Pell Grants, and yet these schools have very low retention rate as they saddle students with life-crippling debt. Not only do most of the students fail to earn a degree or find employment, but virtually all of the faculty work without tenure or any other form of job security or academic freedom. Moreover, these schools spend most of their money on marketing, administration, and technology.

As I argue in my forthcoming book, Why Public Higher Education Should be Free, the world is now faced with two central options: either we go down the road of for-profit education, or we find a way to make all public higher education free. My research shows that we could eliminate tuition by just using current resources in a more planned and rational way, and if we do not do this, we will end up creating a privatized system with high costs and low quality. Furthermore, the push for MOOCs and other forms of privatized online instruction are in reality just a distraction from the real problems facing higher education, which center around out-of-control student debt, state de-funding, the rise of the administrative class, and the casualization of the academic labor force.

As Evgeny Morozov argues in his book To Save Everything, Click Here, we are constantly being told that every social problem can be fixed through technology, and education is just one example of how high-tech solutionists have taken over the public and political imagination. Leading the way in this new form of capitalist utopianism is the Silicon Valley billionaires and millionaires who hope to get rich by appearing to do good. Instead of dealing with the complex and messy aspects of our social world, the techno-evangelists sell efficiency, transparency, certitude, and perfection. In the context of higher education in California, each week seems to bring another high-tech solution to our problems of access and affordability. However, as Morozov reminds us, cheap fixes prevent us from developing real, sustainable public policy.

Likewise, the push to base university funding on degree attainment rates applies a factory model of production to the complicated world of instruction. Instead of pushing for innovative creativity, we are re-imagining education as a technological machine that spits out graduates at a faster rate. Yet, students are not widgets, and faculty are not assembly line workers; instead, we need complex solutions to complex systems.

April 24th saw a flurry of activity for higher ed in Sacramento. In the morning, Senator Steinberg faced an onslaught of criticism for his online education bill. Students, faculty, and unions have successfully forced the leader of the state senate to rewrite his legislation so that it now only sets a goal rather than requires an online version of the 50 most impacted courses in the three higher ed segments. Moreover, Steinberg has backed off his insistence that the systems use public-private partnerships to develop these online courses, and he has inserted language stating that no public money will go to the private side of a public-private partnerships. While the devil will be in the details, the bill has been pulled back and will be re-introduced next week.

Meanwhile, the governor has released his long-awaited accountability framework for higher education. The essential part of this new funding model for higher education is the following: “Up to a 20% increase in General Fund appropriations to UC and CSU over a four-year period (2013-14 through 2016-17), representing about a 10% increase in total operating funds. Freeze on UC and CSU resident tuition from 2013-14 to 2016-17. If a segment raises tuition during any of those years, its cumulative funding augmentation beginning in 2013-14 will be forfeited and cannot be earned back. For UC and CSU, funding augmentations will be contingent on progress made toward the following goals. (Note: the latest values for the performance measures will be updated this fall to reflect actual 2011-12 values, which will serve as the base year): Ten percent improvement of on-time graduation rates by 2016-17 (meaning 4 years for freshmen and 2 years for transfer students). Ten percent increase in the number of degrees completed by 2016-17 for: First-time freshmen, Transfer students, Pell Grant recipients (both freshmen and transfers). Ten percent improvement in undergraduate degree completions per 100 full- time equivalent enrolled students by 2016-17, to capture improvements in efficiency.” Essentially, the governor wants the universities to freeze tuition, increase the number of transfer and Pell grant students, and move everyone through the systems in a reduced time.

Governor Brown has added these further qualifications to his plan: “If a segment partially meets its targets, it will still receive a proportional share of its planned funding augmentation. Additionally, segments can recoup any funding lost by missing an interim target if they fully meet a subsequent year’s target, up through 2016-17. Segments will be expected to show 1%, 3%, and 6% improvement on each of the outcome measures in the first three years of the plan, respectively, or the segments may propose alternative interim measures and targets provided they can show those interim measures build to the same overall 10% targets in 2016-17. Universities will report annually on progress made toward the targets, biennially on spending on graduate versus undergraduate instruction and research, and on any additional measures that are deemed appropriate for tracking effects on educational quality and service to disadvantaged students.” This push for a more efficient system is thus coupled with a requirement for more budgetary transparency.

The full details of this plan should be outlined in the governor’s May Revise budget. It will be interested to see how the UC system reacts to this new emphasis on undergraduate education.

As many people now know, student loan debt has surpassed $1 trillion, but few people understand the structure and effects of this type of educational mortgage system. First of all, a recent New York Federal Reserve report shows how recent college graduates have contributed to the recession by not buying cars and homes like they once did. Due to their high level of student debt, low employment rates, and bad credit ratings, college grads cannot afford to contribute to the consumer economy.

More importantly, while students with debt graduate with on average $26,000 in loans, this amount soon balloons once these students fail to make their payments. The New York Fed reports that 31% of federal student loans are in default, and only 56% of all student loans are in repayment (the rest are in forbearance or deferral). Of course one of the major reasons why students are not able to pay back their loans is that they cannot find jobs, and the jobs they are finding often come with low wages. In fact, according to a recent Pew survey, only 42% of college grads have jobs requiring college degrees. For the most part, only students with diplomas in medicine, engineering, and computer science are finding jobs that match their education.

Meanwhile, as a record number of students default on their loans, these debts are being sliced and diced and sold on the secondary market, just like mortgages. In this toxic brew of debt, speculation, and federal guarantees, we may be seeing the roots of the next big financial meltdown. Student loans are a great target for speculation and exploitation because unlike most forms of debt, they are exempt from bankruptcy protections, the Truth in Lending Act, the FDCPA, state consumer protection laws, state usury laws, and the statute of limitations. Yes, student loans are ripe for a speculation bubble due to the fact that they are backed by the federal government, and there is virtually no way for the debtors to escape from their escalating debt.

Stepping back, we can now see that perhaps the most devastating result of the state defunding of higher education is the creation of a generation of indentured students who will never be able to use their education in a productive manner. (many of the sources and ideas for this blog entry come from the blogger and avid commenter Unemployed_Northeastern)

It is rare that people in power actually say what they think, but the current President of San Jose State, Mohammad H. Qayoumi, recently exposed what many university leaders really believe. In response to a question concerning the questionable educational value of some of his institution’s new online classes, Qayoumi said the following: “It could not be worse than what we do face to face.” This shocking statement implies that the current modes of education at his own university are so bad that nothing could be worse.

It is no wonder that many education leaders are willing to experiment with unproven instructional models when they themselves do not believe in the value of their own teachers or the learning of their own students. It is also not surprising that many academic institutions are now willing to give course credit for work and learning done outside of their schools. Since no one can seem to define or defend quality higher education, there is no stopping a race to the bottom where students are given credits and credentials for unproven and untested learning.

In an act of pure institutional suicide, universities are simply selling their credits to outside entities, are in a way, they are surrendering to their own logic of self-destruction. By saying that nothing could be worse than the current form of education at his university, Qayoumi opens the door for a large-scale privatization of public higher education. This move fits in well with legislators who want to make up for years of public educational defunding by turning to MOOCs and credit by exams. For example, Assembly member Scott Wilk’s bill for a New University of California reduces the idea of a university to simply testing students for previous work and learning. This bill exposes one of the hidden desires of so many political officials and university administrators, and that is a university or college without faculty. In the race to decrease the compensation and power of teachers, here we find a way for a “final” solution: eliminate all of the people.

Unless universities and colleges begin to support, improve, and defend their own educational methods, there is nothing stopping this bi-partisan move to destroy our institutions of higher learning.

Last year, the legislature moved UC budget transparency language through the budget conference committee's "supplemental report" process. The language that was adopted by the legislature and became part of the supplemental report is the following: “Item 6440-001-0001—University of California (UC). It is the intent of the Legislature, and in follow-up to State Audit Report 2010-105, that by July 31, 2012, UC provide to the appropriate legislative budget subcommittees and LAO the recommendations of the systemwide working group established to examine variation in funding across the system. Further, it is the intent of the Legislature that UC identify the amount of revenues from the general funds and tuition budget that each campus received in 2012 13 for specific types of students (such as undergraduate, graduate, and health sciences) and explain any differences in the amount provided per student among the campuses to the appropriate legislative budget subcommittees and LAO by January 1, 2014.”

In response to this legislative request for accountability, the UC has told the legislature that it cannot calculate how much it costs to educate specific types of students: “The University is unable to provide information on funding provided for specific levels of students. Funding from the State is neither received nor allocated to the campuses by level of student. Funding for enrollment has been received from the State for more than 15 years on the basis of a marginal cost calculation that does not distinguish among levels of students. Nor have allocations to the campuses been made on that basis. The University has consistently stated that information on cost of education by level of student – or expenditures by level of student – are impossible to determine, given the myriad way in which funds provided from the State and other core funds are used.”

What is strange about this response is that in the same document, the UC states that it has moved to a new model of distributing state funds based on the following logic: “Per-student funding is to be distributed on a weighted basis in which undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate professional, and graduate academic master’s students are weighted at 1, doctoral students at 2.5, and health sciences students at 5 (except health sciences undergraduate students are at 1 and health sciences academic doctoral students are at 2.5).” So while the UC claims it cannot calculate the different costs of educating different levels of students, it is basing state funding distributions on a differentiated cost basis.

All of this may be moot because in the January state budget proposal, the Governor's administration proposed stronger, trailer bill language on UC budget transparency: “Article 7.5 Expenditures for Undergraduate and Graduate Instruction and Research Activities 92670. (a) The University of California shall report biennially to the Legislature and the Department of Finance, on or before October 1, 2014, and on or before October 1 of each even-numbered year thereafter on the total general campus costs of education, on a systemwide and a campus-by-campus basis, segregated by undergraduate instruction, graduate instruction, and research activities. The costs shall also be reported by fund source, including all of the following sources: (1) State General Fund. (2) Systemwide tuition and fees and professional fees. (3) Nonresident supplemental tuition and other student fees. (4) All other sources of income. (b) For purposes of the report required by this section, undergraduate and graduate research for which a student earns credit toward their degree program shall be included under instructional costs. (c) A report to be submitted pursuant to this section shall be submitted in compliance with Section 9795 of the Government Code. (d) The requirement for submitting a report under this section shall become inoperative on January 1, 2021, pursuant to Section 10231.5 of the Government Code.” In other words, the UC is now required to do exactly what we have been asking them to do for ten years, and that is to calculate how much it costs to educate students and how these activities are being funded.

One reason why it is important to have the UC report on educational costs is that many legislators are now pushing online education because they believe the cost of educating undergraduates is driving up tuition and blocking access. However, in reality, undergraduates are already subsidizing different parts of the university. Moreover, the new rebenching funding model pushes some campuses to increase their enrollments of doctoral students, but no one really knows if this will help or hurt the funding of the campuses since no one knows how much it costs to educate graduate students.

Watching Senator Steinberg’s press conference on the push to give credit for online courses, one can’t help but think that he is on the right path. After all, thousands of Californian students can’t get into classes, and MOOCs offer a new opportunity to deal with this problem in an efficient manner. Steinberg was also quick to stress that the faculty would have final say on which courses would be used, and so quality would be maintained. However, once one starts to look into the details of this deal, everything becomes much more complicated and problematic.

According to the outline of the new senate bill, three professors from each of the three segments would form a committee that would review classes and decide which needed classes would be put online for course credit. The first question to ask is who are these professors and what qualifies them to make curricular decisions for thousands of other faculty members. Also, how will they decide which courses to use and what defines a high-quality course? Moreover, is it possible to design classes that are appropriate for all three segments?

There is also the problem of who will get the revenue from the cross-system enrollments. Does the funding stay with the initial provider or does each campus get a cut of the action? A related concern is how do they decide when a class is over-enrolled, and will campuses be motivated to cut their lower-division classes so students will be forced to take less expensive online versions?

It is clear that this online move is being imposed from above, and it fails to take account the reality on the ground. As I have stressed with lawmakers, if you remove the bottleneck in lower-division courses, you will create a bottleneck in the upper-division. Moreover, these bottlenecks are in part caused by the fact that since too many students want to get into the same majors, lower-division courses are used to weed out lower-performing students. Also, many students come to college and university not fully prepared for higher education, and putting them into MOOCs will not help this situation.

Senator Steinberg has assured us that this new program will not be a substitute for public funding of higher education, but it is clear that the state is using online courses as a way to hide the chronic underfunding of all levels of education in California. Not only has the state reduction of funding for the UC system resulted in larger undergraduate classes and fewer course options for students, but the students now entering into the university system are the products of large classes and low per student K-12 funding. Online education will not fix years of educational neglect.

To voice your opposition to Steinberg’s Bill, please sign the UC Berkeley Faculty Association petition here.

UC Santa Cruz is the only campus with union representation for its senate members, and since the faculty association (SCFA) has the right to bargain over local employment issues, it has determined that the university failed to meet its basic contractual obligations when it signed off on an online program without union approval. Meanwhile, UC-AFT is also in the process of filing grievances over a similar set of issues, and now we are moving to a confrontation that could have national implications.

In the SCFA Request for Information letter to the university, the Faculty Association points out that the recent deal with Coursera conflicts with several legal and contractual requirements. The first issue concerns who owns the intellectual property of a faculty lecture or class: “In 2000, CUCFA successfully lobbied for legislation establishing that individual professors, and not the University, own the intellectual property in their live performances and course materials. . . Viewed within this legal framework the contract template that faculty will be expected to sign before their courses can become available on Coursera appears to put the UCSC campus in the position of becoming the publisher of this material on Coursera and other platforms.” In other words, UC is asking faculty to sign away their intellectual property rights.

The faculty contract with Coursera states the following: "I hereby irrevocably grant the University the absolute right and permission to use, store, host, publicly broadcast, publicly display, public[sic] perform, distribute, reproduce and digitize any Content that I upload, share or otherwise provide in connection with the Course or my use of the Platform, including the full and absolute right to use my name, voice, image or likeness (whether still, photograph or video) in connection therewith, and to edit, modify, translate or adapt any such Content.” So UC is using Coursera to get faculty to sign over their courses, intellectual property, and their IDENTITIES. Forgive me for being paranoid, but does this mean that if a faculty member signs this deal, they no longer own their own name, face, or image?

As the SCFA argues in its letter to the university, the UC should have first bargained with the union before it signed a contract with Coursera that changed the terms and conditions of UCSC senate faculty. This same problem is currently facing lecturers, where the UC has also failed to bargain with UC-AFT before it started several online programs affecting the terms and conditions of lecturers’ employment.

SCFA has asked the university the following important questions: “Was there a confidentiality agreement between Coursera and the campus? If so, at whose initiative was such an agreement undertaken? Who were the parties to this agreement on UCSCs side? If any Senate faculty were parties to the agreement, does the administration consider them to have been acting on behalf of the Senate? Was there any other form, official or unofficial, in which the Senate was consulted prior to signing the contract with Coursera? Has any member of SCFA's bargaining unit, other than administrators, signed the agreement needed to post their classes on Coursera?” The implication of these questions is that the university administration circumvented both the academic senate and the faculty union by making a deal with Coursera, and this deal may include a confidentiality agreement that would force the university to hide the details from its own faculty.

In light of Senator Steinberg’s recent push to have UC students take courses with online providers, everyone should be concerned about the level of secrecy in the current deals with Coursera.

Senator Steinberg is pushing a bill that will potentially outsource many of the University of California lower-division courses to outside course provides like Udacity and Coursera. Here we see one of the clearest examples of privatizing a public good. The state cuts the UC budget for years, and then the same people who cut the budget say we should now turn to online education to deal with the mess. Of course they add that faculty will have a say, but the question is which faculty, and can they stop a plan that is supported by the university president, the governor, and now the legislature?

As I told people in the governor’s office and various legislative staff, there is no evidence that this will save money or move people through the system in a more efficient manner. There is also ample evidence that the students who need the most individual attention will end up having their courses online. I have urged the Academic Council to fight this move, but it looks like the senate is either being co-opted or pushed aside.

This move is a recipe for administrative bloat and the further undermining of shared governance in the University of California. Already people are questioning the value of a UC degree, and so we must ask, who will fight this change?

The dominant take away from the Little Hoover Commission Hearing on Higher Education Funding and Online Education is that many stakeholders believe that most problems in California higher ed can be solved through distance education. Presenters argued that online courses will lower the cost of instruction and make it possible to enroll more students and graduate them at a much higher rate. Daphne Koller even argued that large online classes are better than small classes because when you have the students do the grading and the feedback, the quality of the responses goes up and the time for responding goes down. This is the “wisdom of the crowds” argument that is fundamental to the ideology of crowdsourcing.

During the UC online presentation, we learned that the university wants to move quickly to place many new courses online starting next Fall. The goal is to rapidly increase the ability of students on one campus to take a course on another campus. There is also the idea that students can take outside MOOC courses and get credit for them by taking an exam or asking for transfer credit. Once again, the stress was on taking care of the gateway course bottleneck.

As I mentioned in my testimony, if you reduce the course congestion in lower-division courses, then you will run into congestion in the upper-division major courses. In fact, one reason why many students cannot graduate on time is that they are weeded out of popular majors. I also pointed out that a recent study has shown that the students who do the poorest in online classes are new students and under-represented minority students, and these are exactly the students UC, CSU, and community colleges are targeting.

I added in my testimony that the state has reduced the UC budget by $1 billion, and we raised tuition to cover that loss, and we also increased the size of classes and the faculty-to-student ratio. Now the state is saying that our expanded courses are not as good as online courses, and so we have to do more with less by shifting to a questionable mode of instruction. Meanwhile, the first presenter of the day argued that the new normal is that higher education will be squeezed out of state budgets, so we have to ask students to take on more of a burden, while we exploit various federal aid programs and tax breaks.

In response to this new normal, we need to push for free public higher ed and a rededication to instruction as a core mission of higher education. This does not mean that we should move away from research; rather, we have to find a more transparent and robust way to support this needed social and economic function. Unfortunately, the fascination with online education only blinds people from seeing the realities and solutions facing public higher education.

I will be testifying on Tuesday, February 26 at the Little Hoover Commission’s public hearing on issues facing California’s higher education system. The hearing is scheduled for 9 a.m. on the campus of Long Beach City College, 4901 East Carson Street, Building T, Room 1100, Long Beach, California. According to the hearing agenda, “the Commission is interested in exploring how institutions such as the University of California and California State University can control costs and increase college affordability; the role faculty can play in increasing time-to- degree completion while maintaining quality and high standards; and the development of online education and the impact that massive open online courses, or MOOCs, might have on costs and degree attainment.”

I have been asked to testify on the following issues: “The principal drivers of increased costs at the university, including sponsored research, graduate and professional education, the increase in the number of administrators, and athletics and campus amenities; The impact, if any, on faculty and potential faculty hiring from UC’s intended promotion of UC Online Education; Whether online educational initiatives such as UC Online can help increase student access to classes, cut the time to degree and ultimately increase the number of graduates; Online education’s overall ability to contain costs and increase affordability for students attending a UC campus; How online education should be incorporated into UC; Other issues concerning the current support for increasing the use of online learning in higher education.”

Here is the schedule for the hearing:

9:00 – 10:-00 a.m. Panel One: Student Aid and Postsecondary Financing
David Longanecker, President, Western Commission for Higher Education

10:00 – 11:-00 a.m. Panel Two: Going Online: MOOCs and Beyond
Daphne Koller, Co-founder, Coursera and Professor, Stanford University Sebastian

Thrun, Co-founder, Udacity and Former Professor, Stanford University

Dean Florez, President and Chief Executive Officer, Twenty Million Minds Foundation

11:00 – 12:-00 p.m. Panel Three: Going Online: UC and CSU
Keith R. Williams, Interim Director, UC Online Education and Senior Lecturer, University of California, Davis

Ruth Claire Black, Executive Director, Cal State Online

Robert Samuels, President, University Council-American Federation of Teachers
and Lecturer, University of California, Los Angeles

12:00 – 1:-00 p.m. Panel Four: The Role of the Faculty
Robert Powell, Chair, University of California Academic Senate and Professor, University of California, Davis

Diana Guerin, Chair, California State University Academic Senate and Professor, California State University, Fullerton.

The hearing is open to the public.

President Yudof sent off a letter yesterday informing faculty and staff that there would be no salary increases in 2012-13 despite the passage of Prop 30 and the governor’s plan to fund three years of UC budget increases. Here is Yudof’s main message: “It is my hope that the passage of Proposition 30 last fall, and the proposed reinvestment in UC in the Governor's budget proposal last month, mark a turning point for our university. After several difficult years, UC appears to be headed on the path to financial stability. Unfortunately, we still have a way to go before the University stands upon a firm financial foundation. As you know, since 2008, UC has been forced to absorb nearly $1 billion in State funding cuts. Re-balancing the University in the wake of those cuts is still a work in progress, and one that requires many of the ongoing measures that helped UC survive the last few budget cycles. As a result, I very much regret that we will not be able to implement systemwide salary increases for UC staff during the current 2012-13 fiscal year. This includes Chancellors and senior leadership.” The first thing to point out is that Yudof’s claim that there can be no salary increases because the UC has had to deal with a billion dollars of “state budget cuts” is simply not true. As I have previously written, tuition increases over the last five years have far outpaced state reductions. What may be true is that the state has not met the UC’s desired funding, but Yudof’s letter is false and misleading.

We were told about this letter during a meeting at the Office of the President where we were discussing bargaining over the lecturer contract. Lecturers have been negotiating with the university since March 2012 over salary and other issues, but the university refused to discuss any economic issues until after the vote on Prop 30. Once Prop 30 passed, we were then told that the university cannot discuss economic issues until we signed off on pension and retiree healthcare issues. Now we are being told that even if we agree to accept reduced retiree benefits, there is still no money for salary increases. In other words, the university has been bargaining in bad faith, and they have proven once again that they do not accept the basic foundation of collective bargaining.

We are left with no choice but to go to the governor and the legislator to show them that the university believes that none of the money from Prop 30 and the multi-year funding agreement should go to undergraduate instruction. Moreover, according to the university’s own budget documents, virtually none of undergraduate student tuition is going to faculty salaries.

Surely at a time when students are going into massive debt to pay for tuition increases, they and their parents will be interested in the fact that the university does not think that tuition should go to support the faculty doing instruction and research. Parents and students might also be alarmed by the following statement from an Associated Press article: “As of May, there were 2,129 UC retirees drawing annual pensions of more than $100,000, 57 with pensions exceeding $200,000 and three with pensions greater than $300,000, according to data obtained by The Associated Press through a state Public Records Act request. The number of UC retirees collecting six-figure pensions has increased by 30 percent over the past two years, according to Californians for Fiscal Responsibility, an advocacy group that has analyzed UC pension data.” Virtually all of these pensions will be going to administrators, coaches, and medical faculty with no direct connection to undergraduate education. In short, UC is cutting core faculty and staff benefits and freezing their salaries in order to support the high wages and pensions of the highest compensated UC employees.

The recent California State Senate hearing on higher education provided some news and many interesting discussions. Patrick Lenz announced that the UC will be holding all day meetings with senate faculty on online education April 13th and 25th. He also added that the UC did not think the move to online courses would save money in the near future. However, UCOP is looking to create more courses for the summer that would be available for cross campus enrollment in the Fall.

Nick Schweizer from the Department of Finance stated that the governor’s basic strategy is to increase funding for the UC system and hold the university accountable to certain outcomes, which have yet to be announced. When pressed for details, he discussed increased graduate rates and a shorter time to degree. He also added that online education could play a major role in reducing costs and increasing efficiencies. One possibility is to use a virtual community college to allow students to take all of their courses online before they transfer to a UC. A related strategy would be to make it easier for students to get credit for outside online courses by using the exam-for-credit program.

While access and affordability were the main themes, legislators had a hard time seeing how the issue of educational quality connected to the governor’s proposals. The real problem is that since there is no real agreement on how to measure and compare student learning and the effectiveness of teaching, everyone falls back on the countable measures of credits and degrees generated. This same problem is evident in President Obama’s new college scorecard, which defines “value” by the net cost, the average debt, the graduation rate, and the loan default rate.

To understand the truth about the UC budget over the last five years, we can look at numbers provided by the legislative analyst and the department of finance. In 2007-8, UC received $3.2 billion from the state, and in 2011-12, it received $2.2 billion; During this time, net tuition went from $1.3 billion to $2.4 billion (these figures subtract 30% for return to aid). So the $1 billion in state cuts were made up for by a $1.1 billion in tuition increases. Moreover, in 2008-9, federal recovery money added $716 million, and another $106 million in 2010-11. From the LAO analyst’s perspective, tuition increases have actually outpaced state reductions. However, UCOP constantly claims that tuition increases have only made up for a third of the state reductions. There seems to be no logical basis for this claim. Perhaps what they are doing is projecting what they wanted to get from the state, and then comparing that figure to tuition increases, but this type of math really makes the legislature not trust the university.

For instance, Speaker John Perez stated at the last regents meeting that, “We've made roughly $900 million in cuts and you've increased fees $1.4 billion dollars. The [fee] increases were disproportionate to the level of disinvestment by the state.” While I do think Perez’s number are a little off, we can look at historical data from the LAO to clarify the situation. Using 2007-8 as our baseline, the following year, the federal recovery money made up for the state reduction, but tuition went up over $700 million (and some faculty and staff had a pay cut called a furlough). The next year, the state funding was $700 million less than 2007-8, and tuition revenue went up $390 million, so we can say the total loss for the first two years was $310 million. In 2010-11, additional recovery money reduced that year’s state reduction to $230 million, but tuition revenue increased $430 million. In 2011-12, the baseline state reduction was $1 billion, and the tuition increase was over $1 billion. If we add up all of these yearly numbers, over the four-year period, the total reduction was $100 million, and if we look at the budget for 2012-13, the tuition revenue is up $1.1 billion from 2007-8’s rate, and state funds are down $700 million. In other words, the five-year change is that UC revenue from tuition and state funds is up $300 million.

This is not to say that relatively flat revenue is a good thing or that students should now be paying almost as much of the state, but what it does show is that UCOP is addicted to presenting false numbers, and the state is starting to fight back. In fact, the governor’s latest budget proposal for 2013-14 has the state giving the UC $2.8 billion, while tuition is projected to be $3.8 billion, which is the same tuition projection as last year and does not take into account the subtraction for institutional aid. Furthermore, the tuition revenue projection will have to be increased because the UC will be accepting a higher number of high-paying non-resident students next year, and they still have not decided on raising fees for professional degree students. In short, using 2007-8 as our baseline, tuition next year should outpace the state reduction by at least $700 million.

In the United States, quality public higher education was once accessible to most Americans able to benefit from it. The way it worked was simple—taxpayers funded public colleges and universities sufficiently so that students who were prepared to work a few hours a week could complete their degrees in a relatively short time with a minimum amount of debt. For those with even greater need, government provided state grants and Pell grants. This system worked well for decades and opened the door to opportunity for millions of Americans.

Now, we are told we can no longer afford this. We believe that is wrong.

The Campaign for the Future of Higher Education has begun a drive to involve our nation’s college and university faculty in the search for better solutions than funding cuts, privatization, soaring tuition and academic shut-downs. Our nation has arrived at our current quandary for a variety of reasons. One is surely a failure of imagination, a set of assumptions that profoundly limits our ability to think about possibilities.

Three working papers released by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education aim at stimulating a more thoughtful, fact-based, national conversation about paying for higher education in this country. Two of the CFHE working papers address the common assumption that funding higher education through public means rather than through skyrocketing tuition is simply impossible.

My paper explores the notion of free higher education and examines what the actual cost to provide such an ideal would be. I argue that we could make big strides towards free public higher education by reallocating current governmental expenditures for higher education and by eliminating regressive tax breaks. (More at: http://ucaft.org/category/issues/why-college-education-could-be-free)

The second paper, using the state of California as a test case, looks at the real magnitude of returning to recent, more adequate levels of state funding for higher education. Stanley Glantz, a professor at UC San Francisco, describes that “reseting” higher education funding to more adequate past levels would require only very small adjustments in the median income tax return.

The third paper explores a currently unused tax revenue source that could be tapped if there were the political will to provide adequate public funding for higher education. Rudy Fichtenbaum, an economics professor at Wright State University in Ohio and national president of the American Association of University Professors, explains how to achieve vastly improved funding for higher education through a miniscule tax on selected financial transactions.

Members of the news media, including campus/student reporters and bloggers on education issues, are invited to a news briefing on Tuesday, February 12 (10 am Pacific/1 pm Eastern) to hear a short discussion by the three authors and to ask them questions about their proposals.

To join the call:
• Call (800) 553-0273 / Ask for “Campaign for the Future of Higher Education”
• You may dial up to 5 minutes for the start time

To see the papers in advance:
• Send an email request to dchernow@calfac.org
• Go to www.futureofhighered.org/workingpapers.

One of the most surprising statements from the Legislative Analyst’s recent report on UC salaries is the following: “In 2010-11, UC spent a total $1.8 billion on salaries and benefits for faculty. As shown in Figure 3, nearly three quarters of the funding for faculty compensation came from the state. The remaining funding sources include a mix of federal funds, sales revenues (such as from clinical services provided at the university’s medical centers), private gifts, student tuition, and other funds. (Though student tuition makes up a relatively small portion of funding supporting faculty, the university could use more tuition revenue in lieu of state funds since the two fund sources are interchangeable.)” Looking at the accompanying pie chart, it appears that student tuition only funds less that 5% of faculty salaries and benefits. So the question remains, according to the university, what are students paying for?

I recently questioned UCOP on a budget document presented at last summer’s Regents meeting that said the state pays for 98% of instruction at UCSB, and I was told that this figure includes student tuition, but now it appears that only a small part of tuition goes to direct instructional costs. Let’s keep in mind that these figures do not include student housing and dining, which are self-supporting, so are students only paying for administration, staffing and related overhead?

What I think is happening here is the UC budget strategy has backfired. UCOP thought that if it argued that almost all of the funding for the core faculty salaries and benefits came from the state, the state would realize that it would have to increase the UC budget because the core is the central function. However, the end result has been that the Legislative Analyst is saying that the UC does not need extra funding from the state because it can just use tuition. Meanwhile, the governor is arguing that the UC is asking for too much money, and so the university will have to reduce costs by turning to online education.

One major side effect of this bad budget gamble is that the legislature may not fund the UC’s attempt to increase funding for the underfunded campuses. In other words, the great hope of the rebenching model might be dashed by the UCOP’s refusal to present a non-manipulated budget. Yet, the truth always continues to live a life of its own, and sometimes, it emerges into daylight, and when it does, the pile of half-truths and misrepresentations backfires. In this case, UCOP’s budget distortions could result in a decrease in state funding and an adoption of a costly online program, which will cheapen the UC degree and will put pressure to raise tuition as students pay more for less and faculty are asked to do more for less.