Zero Fees, Zero Low Income Students?
Robert J. Birgeneau
The Sacramento Bee
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
We hear a lot these days about an idealized vision of zero fees for students at the University of California. As undergraduate fees surpass $10,000 in 2010-11, those who attended Berkeley in the 1960’s look back nostalgically to the era when fees were around $200 a year. Others simply hold as an ideology that public education should be free: they often point to Clark Kerr’s Master Plan as the great ideal of free state-provided education for every qualified Californian. Proponents of free public education argue that zero fees today would provide increased accessibility for underrepresented minorities.
This is an especially persuasive argument, given the importance of extending the California Dream to the state’s new 21st century demographic. Persuasive, if it were true, but it is not. On the contrary, for future generations of aspiring Californians, zero fees would end the promise of the “California Dream” of world-class, accessible public higher education.
Let us consider the practical consequences of a return to a zero fees policy. Both the economic make-up and the ethnic background of Berkeley’s undergraduate class are very different from a half century ago. In the ‘50s and ’60s, the student population was largely Caucasian and much more economically homogeneous. Today, there is no majority population in our student body at Berkeley and about 1/3 of our students come from low-income families. Further, the majority of our undergraduate students from underrepresented minorities come from low income families. Forty years ago, the State provided 60% of the campus’s budget. Today, it provides only 22%.
With the recently approved fee schedule for California (in-state) students, undergraduate fees at Berkeley next September will be slightly over $10,000. The fee is a small fraction of the total cost of attending. Additional costs, including room and board, books, health insurance, etc., raise the cost to more than $31,000. This is a very large amount. However, the really important number is what students, especially those from low-income families, actually have to pay. How is that amount determined?
For UC Berkeley, our in-state and out-of-state undergraduate students combined in 2010-11 will generate a total educational fee income of about $315 million; $230 million will go into the university’s operating budget to pay for faculty and staff salaries and other operating costs, while $85 Million will be returned to financial aid. The “return-to-aid” provides funding for grants (not loans) to students with financial need, most especially those from low income families.
Through Cal Grants and the University of California’s Blue and Gold Opportunity Program, fees are completely covered for eligible students from families with incomes under $70,000. However, this still leaves some $21,000 in remaining costs. Federal Pell Grants, and more importantly, the portion of fees returned to financial aid, reduce the $21,000 to about $9,000 for our lowest income students. Our students typically cover this remaining amount, which is called the “self-help” level, through a combination of work study and loans. Without return to aid, that is, if fees were zero, the required self help contribution would be much higher, possibly $15,000 or $16,000. Our low income students would graduate with debts as high as $50,000 compared with the current average debt of $14,000. The one-third of our students with family incomes under $45,000 would find it extremely difficult if not impossible to attend Berkeley. More than one-half of our underrepresented minority students fall into this category and so a policy of zero fees would have a devastating effect on the diversity of the UC Berkeley undergraduate student body.
We also have some very important challenges for middle-class families under our current financial aid structure. Specifically, because of federal policies, students from families with incomes of about $100,000 typically receive very little financial aid other than loans. This puts an unreasonable burden on the middle class. The solution for the middle class is not zero fees. Rather, we need to develop a uniformly accessible system that would help all those with real financial need. This means more, not fewer, resources for financial aid.
Many people, including myself, would argue as a matter of social justice that students from affluent families should pay fees because a policy of zero fees represents a transfer of income from the poor to the rich. Whether or not one agrees with this philosophical position, the practical effect of zero fees is undeniable: unless financial aid funds were radically increased, which is unlikely to happen in the current state economy, reducing fees to zero would have a devastating effect on how representative our Berkeley student body is of today’s, and, even more, of tomorrow’s California. In addition, if the state government did not replace the $230 million that undergraduate fees provide for education, the quality of education would be greatly diminished.
Berkeley and the University of California as a whole seek to be a leaders in providing accessible and excellent public education for California. The vision of zero fees would end rather than fulfill this promise.