Is a UC education affordable?
Open Forum
San Francisco Chronicle
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/08/22/ED3ERM87F...
This week, we are welcoming more than 6,400 new undergraduate students to UC Berkeley, about 4,300 directly from high school and 2,100 junior transfer students, primarily from community colleges. These students are enthusiastic, idealistic, and most of all, extraordinarily talented and ambitious. They are the future of the state of California. They reflect the marvelous ethnic mosaic that is California, and they come from the poorest to the richest families. Notably, some 7,500 undergraduates, about a third of our students, come from families whose income is less than $40,000 per year, and nearly that number are the first in their families to attend a four-year college.
How is this possible, especially given growing public concern that high fees are making college unaffordable? At UC Berkeley, the estimated student budget for the academic year including fees of $7,165, room and board, books and other necessities is just more than $25,000. While this amount is clearly affordable for some families, how does a student whose family income is less than $40,000 per year manage?
In fact, for the 2007-08 academic year that student only needs to pay $8,000 - an amount that we refer to as the "self-help level" - for education at one of the finest universities in the world. These students provide the $8,000 through a combination of work-study and loans, while the remaining $17,000 is provided by the university through an elaborate system of financial aid. For all students, the real cost of college education, as opposed to the full cost, is more affordable if the self-help level is kept low. The self-help level is an amount the campus sets each year based on a formula that takes in to account total grant and scholarship funds available, family contribution levels and annual student cost.
Rapidly growing costs of living, not increases in fees, drive up the self-help level. A UC Berkeley education is more affordable for poor families this year than it has been since 2004, even though the UC Regents have increased fees by about $1,000 over the last three years. At Berkeley over the past two years, by keeping student housing and insurance costs contained, we've been able to keep the student costs in check . By using temporary funds, we have been able to augment federal and state grants and thus reduce the self-help level from a high of $8,600 to $8,000 for the upcoming year through a combination of state and federal financial aid, careful management to contain costs, plus a one-third set-aside of fee increases to provide financial aid to the most disadvantaged of our students. The one-third set-aside provides enough funding so that poor students do not have to pay for fee increases now or in the future.
Maintaining this affordability will require even more creativity and energy in the coming years. For one thing, we need to lower financial barriers for middle-class families. Although, we have markedly done this for students from poor families, the middle class still faces significant challenges because we simply do not have enough money to provide the same level of financial aid to a student from a family earning, say, $60,000 per year.
A second challenge is to find generous new sources of financial aid in the immediate future to keep the self-help level as low as possible. All of our projections indicate that without new sources of financial aid, the self-help level could exceed $12,000 five years from now. Would that represent a tipping-point for those from low-income families? Undoubtedly, we must find new sources of financial aid both to reduce the burden on the middle class and to guarantee continued accessibility of our great universities to the poorest of Californians. We cannot wait - this must be done now.
For the past two years, I have been advocating in Sacramento for the establishment of a new public-private partnership for needs-based financial aid for all UC students. The essential idea is as follows. Suppose an idealistic, generous donor gives the university $100,000 to establish an endowed scholarship for highly meritorious students from poor families. The state would then match this gift so that the total endowment would be $200,000. The income from this endowment would provide scholarship aid for the indefinite future.
This approach has been highly successful in other states and in Canada where donors have given generously in response to matches from the government. From the government's point of view, this will bring in new monies from the private sector to guarantee that our universities can fulfill their public mission. It is a strategy that should and does appeal to both Democrats and Republicans. A state allotment of $150 million a year for the next seven years to this public-private partnership could essentially guarantee that the University of California will be accessible to every single Californian for the indefinite future.
Ten years from now, almost all the students who enter UC Berkeley this week will be using their education to contribute to society as productive citizens. We need to guarantee that a decade from now, new undergraduates entering UC Berkeley will still come from all sectors of California's population, regardless of wealth. Then they can join the never-ending chain of university graduates who have contributed so much to California and the nation. There is no better investment in our common future.