Originally Posted by
San Francisco Chronicle
(07-22) 12:12 PDT Long Beach -- - It just got about $1,000 more expensive to attend California State University for one year - and students are furious.
With a tentative state budget agreement that gouges almost $3 billion from colleges and universities, CSU trustees voted Tuesday to raise student fees by 20 percent. They also gave campuses unprecedented power to disenroll thousands of students who keep taking classes despite having enough credits to graduate.
It's part of an overall effort by CSU to cut $584 million from its $4.6 billion budget by reducing enrollment, laying-off employees and slashing course offerings. CSU employee unions also are wrestling with whether to accept unpaid furloughs amounting to a 10 percent pay cut, or allow additional layoffs to sweep through the system.
"What we're doing doesn't give anyone pleasure today," Jeff Bleich, chairman of the Board of Trustees, told an auditorium full of CSU students and employees from around the state who converged on CSU headquarters in Long Beach to try to persuade the board to reject the fee hike.
"Shame! Shame!" shouted students as the trustees voted 17-1 to raise the fee by $672, bringing to $4,827 the annual cost for an undergraduate to attend one of CSU's 23 campuses. Because the trustees had already raised the fee by 10 percent in May, the cost of attending CSU is up by almost $1,000 this fall.
The trustees also voted to increase graduate student fees by $828 - raising their annual tuition to $4,962. Nonresident tuition was raised to more than $11,000 a year. And the fees for a teacher credential rose by $780, to $4,674.
Even so, the fee hikes won't affect everyone. Financial aid and federal Pell Grants will shield about 42 percent of CSU students, 187,000, from having to pay the higher fees, CSU officials said.
Casting the lone vote against the fee increases was Lt. Gov. John Garamendi, a CSU trustee as well as a regent of the University of California. Just as he had done at the regents' meeting last week, Garamendi urged the trustees on the CSU finance committee to support Assembly Bill 656 - a tax on oil refineries that he said would shower colleges with about $1 billion a year.
"Let's see how much noise we can make to overcome the lobbying influence of the oil industry," he said to the applause of the students and faculty.
But the trustees - like the UC regents the week before - expressed little interest in the oil tax for higher education.
Herbert Carter, vice chair of the board, said: "It is just these kinds of special interest initiatives that have driven us to the brink of disaster."
The audience hissed as the finance committee rejected Garamendi's idea, and several speakers accused the trustees of poorly representing their interests.
"I'm feeling angry, frustrated and disgusted at the board for your cowardice," Gabriela Serrato, a student from Cal State Los Angeles, told the board.
The most raucous objections came from outside the auditorium, as a couple hundred students pounded on drums and shouted their displeasure through the auditorium doors and under the windows.
The students had been holding a continuous vigil outside the chancellor's office since Sunday evening.
Groups of students stayed up all night in shifts - not partying or playing music - but reading aloud into a bullhorn from the California Master Plan for Higher Education.
At times they switched to reading a well-marked copy of Paulo Freire's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed," a book dedicated "to the oppressed and to those who suffer with them and fight at their side."
"It's been an awesome experience," said student organizer Vanessa Rojas, 22, an English major at Cal State Bakersfield on the 9:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m. shift.
The students also used their time to rehearse what they would shout at the trustees and at Chancellor Charles Reed as they entered the building Tuesday morning - and to practice falling down as if they were dying from the cuts to their classes.
"Remember! Bend your knees!" an organizer admonished.
It all fell into place Tuesday as the students and CSU employees marched with signs and noisemakers so loud that the trustees could not ignore their presence.
One protester, sophomore Adriana Quiquivix, had been studying nursing at San Francisco State University. But all of the chemistry and lab classes she needed were full, semester after semester, she said.
"So I signed up for the second session of summer school - and they canceled that!" she said.
Finally, she switched to liberal studies.
Her story of canceled classes is increasingly typical at CSU, and many students told the trustees their stories, some of them in tears.
In the end, however, the trustees called it their fiduciary responsibility to raise fees. They said the fee increases will fill $157 million of the system's budget gap and set aside $79 million more for financial aid.
The trustees also approved a policy in which campuses can now force the departure of "super students" - those with enough credits to graduate. They were unsure how many students would be affected.
Instant 20% rise in California State University fees
fees for this semester, really pisses me off how they added like $500 to my fees. Its downright ridiculous. Is increasing fees on those and their mainly middle class families the best way to solve Californias budget? The CSU system used to be FREE, and I understand that things change but this is driving the costs to high for most families and is going to create a poorly educated America and further income divide. At the risk of getting personal I also wanted to show you my fees.
(Oh..and housing is a whole other bundle of financial joy)
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, less competition when i apply for law school there.
