Mission shrinking

Some programs are under threat of being eliminated entirely. UCLA’s Academic Senate suspended admissions to its “International Development Studies” major last year, largely because of the difficulty students had in fulfilling the course requirements in the face of so many class cancellations. Campus libraries are closing earlier, and some book collections are being moved to save money on overseeing access. Students contributed funds in order to help the library maintain its tradition of staying open 24 hours a day during mid-terms and finals, Santos said. 

University officials contend that the budget cuts enacted in 2008 and 2009 crippled UC’s ability to woo promising new research faculty. Faculty were already earning 11 percent less on average than their counterparts at other public institutions and 20 percent less than their colleagues at top private research universities. With the cuts, searches for new faculty virtually halted.  Restrictions on travel saved the university $110 million, according to budget documents, but meant scholars had a harder time attending academic conferences, where they present their work, connect with colleagues, and learn about new research.

The new emphasis on shedding course requirements, rather than building up areas of scholarship, may also signal retrenchment to the rising stars of research, leading many to make their academic home elsewhere. Particularly at a research university, the premium is on original contributions to scholarship, rather than on teaching alone. New research also brings in funding, which further sustains the university enterprise.

More importantly, said Hartle, of the American Council on Education, the uncertainty and dislocation generated by sudden budget cuts, forced furloughs, salary freezes, and crowded classes, hurts campus morale.  That, in turn, hinders recruitment of new talent. “If you go visit, and faculty and staff are demoralized, that gets conveyed,” Hartle said. “Financial turmoil never helps recruit faculty or staff.”

“If they stay on this trajectory, it’s very clear that the university [system] will face terrible challenges in maintaining its quality and the premier status that it’s had,” said Robert M. Berdahl, former chancellor at the Berkeley campus and president of the Association of American Universities, which represents the nation’s 63 top research universities — six of which belong to the University of California system. “These are extraordinarily difficult reductions in revenue to accommodate. There’s no doubt that the reduction in recruitments, the challenges they will have in retaining faculty — and to some extent already have in retaining faculty — will worsen considerably.”

“This is like watching a car accident in slow motion, to see what the state of California is doing to what should be a priceless resource,” said Hartle. “There’s nothing positive you can point to in this development.”

Outsiders in, insiders out

To offset some of the cuts to its budget, the university plans to admit more students from other states and overseas.  Those students pay higher tuition and, in the case of foreign students, are largely ineligible for financial aid. Currently, out-of-state and foreign students account for 22 percent of the freshmen at Berkeley and 15 percent at UCLA. Their payments — $23,000 on top of the $11,000 in-state residents pay for tuition — ultimately subsidize students who are state residents, officials say. But they also come as the university, for the first time, is lowering freshman enrollment in response to a decline in state support.

The shift undermines a central tenet of the master plan: that the campuses should be open to any state resident who qualifies. The university does offer generous financial aid to lower-income students, covering full tuition for families earning less than $70,000 this year, and $80,000 next year, and giving middle class students a one-year reprieve from the latest round of tuition increases. But in response to budget cuts, the University of California reduced enrollment by 3,800 eligible freshmen over the last two years, primarily by denying them admission to their choice of campus, while the much larger Cal State system cut enrollment by about 40,000. Community colleges, feeders for the Cal State and UC systems, turned away 140,000 students last year.  

In the 1960s, California led the nation in access to higher education, and in the share of students graduating with a college degree. Today, it ranks well below average among the states, 34th in terms of college access for low-income students, and 15th in the share of its population with a bachelor’s or more advanced degree.

UC belt-tightening

With their institution’s future in the balance, officials at the University of California have launched an all-out drive to cut spending. Their 10 campuses teamed up with the 23 of the state university system to save on travel and purchase costs, and introduced a raft of other administrative measures, with projections that they would save $500 million over the next five years. Officials revamped the university system’s defined benefit pension scheme to require employee contributions for the first time. They are also reducing benefits for employees hired after 2013, and raising the retirement age for new employees to 65 from 60. Those steps, they estimate, will save 20 percent on the university’s pension bill.

UC sees these savings “as the tip of the iceberg,” Nathan Brostrom, executive vice president for business operations at the University of California, said during a recent press conference at which university officials unveiled their budget request for next year.

In a later interview, Brostrom said that the university could earn another $600 million a year by raising its charges for overhead on research and foundation grants. Currently, the University of California collects 53.5 percent from government research grant awards for overhead, while private Ivy League institutions typically collect 60 to 68 percent. (The chances of recovering the full amount projected may be slim, however, as federal grants carry strict rules about charges for such “indirect costs.”) 

“There’s going to be no single silver bullet,” Brostrom said, but many places where the university will go after new sources of revenue.

Asked at the press conference why the university had not taken these cost-cutting steps sooner, Mark Yudof, president of the University of California, told Remapping Debate that, “historically, we were slow. We were not as out front as we should have been. We’re a big complicated system,” he said. “Even though we did find individual campuses taking this on, we didn’t see it across the board, and that’s what we’re trying to do now.”