Great school!

It's easy to freeze tuition. That's not the point.

What he did was increase spending on colleges. That came at the expense of other programs, eliminating some government jobs, as well as increasing taxes (in ways which, if the wrong person were to use, would be called "regressive&quot . He finally had to relent.

I've seen other colleges freeze tuition. "Good policy, great politics," but often it just eats capital unless you keep up with what needs to be kept up with. Not all "capital" is money. Faculty salaries, infrastructure, consumables all need to be funded. You can freeze spending on them, but after a while you find that you're losing faculty, your unfunded infrastructure needs are increasing too fast, and your technology (etc.) are out of date. Students and current users love having tuition frozen; but unless it's done right, the next group of students and users find that they're getting damaged goods.

(Of course, those responsible rejected this idea out of hand as politically motivated. Grad students, who hang around longer than undergrads, saw the change quite clearly. And a couple of years later politicians were calling for "rebuilding." The same ones who said that the freeze wouldn't hurt anything, then didn't hurt anything, said they needed to fix the damage they'd helped cause when that became "good policy and great politics.&quot

It's a target the repubs have been focused on since the 70's.

Public schools are under attack: charter schools and vouchers and killing off the good teachers.

According to many repub politicians, Universities are supposed to be a "private" college that is "for profit", not a service of the state that belongs to the public.

Also note that faculty salaries are stagnant, while administrations are increasing in size and pay, which adds to costs but doesn't help students.

I'll bet that even though your community college gets little support from the state, the state likely controls the college! The board members or president likely is hired or appointed by the state. In my view, if you don't pay, then why do you claim control!!

Colleges need to be back in the control of FACULTY who teach - not state politicians or for-profit businesses.

What mattered is who was neediest and had the most votes.

The UC budget was cut and cut and cut, regardless of the administration, but at not point ever became "for profit." That's not going to happen at public universities because of the charter they have. They're non-profits. The worst that could happen is they're independent non-profits.

The budget cuts usually were small. K-12 education, health care/social services chipped away at nearly everything non-essential in the budget. These get votes. These have public support. Only when post-secondary ed became a political issue did *any* party seriously try to keep down costs.

The effect was greatest during recessions, at least in Calif. The legislature used every cent of tax money, often for long-term, multi-year programs or entitlements. (Yes, some people think that's a bad word. But when the government sets up a program with requirements which, if met, entitle you to the money or services, it's by definition an entitlement. Whatever colloquial English or emotions may say.) During a recession they couldn't or wouldn't cut long-term spending on services, tax revenues fell, and something had to be cut. When the recession was over, they'd again expand long-term, multi-year programs or entitlements and not restore funding to everything that was cut. Cycle through a few recessions and post-secondary education didn't get get a haircut, it was scalped.

We'll ignore whether or not UC and CSU swelled a bit much in the '60s and '70s and exceeded their mandates or not.

contracts with private bookstores, private services of all kinds on campus mandated by the state. Usually it's housing, food services, etc. Athletics takes money, but any profits don't find their way back to the institution.

With land grant institution models years ago, colleges were PAYGO, with state money covering deficits and development of foundations to get through bad years (or build big projects).

Now, states mandate more and more services have to be contracted out, if you develop a big foundation the state reduces their contribution, and colleges can't depend on state support. It's the students who suffer.

State schools that are popular now are literally admitting students on the likelihood that families can not only pay, but will likely donate. That's a hidden undercurrent in admissions for the traditional "fun" schools.

CA is stuck with tax limits, so they also can't do much to fix budgets. Still, CA used to be a great supporter of higher education. Now it's a state with big problems.

listening to an instructor of French argue the college had to raise tuition to look like it belonged to a class of more prestigious schools.

Later I sat in meetings discussing tuition and the idea was promoted to create a high sticker price to facilitate maximum size of student loans and to attract students with fake scholarships paid with funny-money...the difference between the advertised sticker price and the typical price. Getting prospects a 'deal' turned out to be a very useful tool for college recruiters.

the above were at private schools...but there were also more legitimate contributions such as the need to repair century old or cheaply built red-brick structures built to capture baby-boomers, to expand capacity to deal with much higher percent of hs grads pursuing higher ed, to provide greater learning-assistance for a larger portion of marginally prepared students, and rising costs of overhead especially in medical benefits and liability protection that hit schools public and private.

Yes, lawmakers response was to rising costs was to dump government responsibility to protect their electability by preventing tax increases. But the explanation of how costs escalated is complex.

In the '90s there was also a "high fee/high financial aid" model.

Oddly, (D) politicians made the most hay out of it, but at its heart it was "progressive". You raise the fees more than necessary. You siphon off a lot of that fee increase and put it into aid for the bottom 20-40% of the student body in the form of grants, not loans.

All the politicians did was run on "college tuition has increased ____%" and "something needs to be done." At the same time, they wanted to raise taxes on the rich to help the poor.

Somehow they missed that the fee structure they didn't want the colleges to impose was precisely the "fee structure" they themselves wanted to impose.

The politicians managed to get fees largely capped for years. Every year after that, however, the amount of grant-based student aid that was generated in-house, on campus, fell. Aid to the neediest was edged out by rising operating costs and a nearly frozen budget. This, the politicians said, was "trimming the fat." In the end, the state legislature responded by setting up a program to increase grants to the neediest budget. (The cynic in me says that the politicians didn't want to share the value of their Altruism Green Stamps with colleges. What's the point of helping the needy if you, the politicians, don't personally benefit from it?)

Give the rich and corporations tax cuts so they can force us to live on less. the CONs MO
You'd almost think they don't want so many of us out here and the ones of us who cling on to not get a hand up at all. Oh thats right thats what they DO want

When I was at Boston U they raised tuition each year. They also built a new gym with a Lazy River around the pool.

...at least in the CSU. When I started in 1997 students paid about 20 percent of the cost of tuition (in past years they paid even less). Today students pay about half the cost of attendance, so the state subsidies have declined by about one third in less than 20 years. So at present, it's disingenuous to call the CSU public higher education because it is a nearly even mix of public and private. It's still one of the best bargains in higher ed, but disinvestment by the legislature is pushing it toward greater and greater reliance upon private financing models.