A TREND TOWARD privatization and a shift in spending priorities is putting California's public colleges and universities at risk of forsaking their mandate to deliver a quality public education to the state's growing ranks of would-be college students.
The eye-popping compensation packages paid by the University of California to its top administrators -- even as Sacramento raised fees, cut services and increased class sizes -- are the latest sign that the state's higher-education system is in trouble. Last year, according to recent reports, UC quietly doled out more than $871 million in bonuses and other benefits to its top employees and administrators. Former Chancellor Robert M. Berdahl of UC Berkeley, for instance, got a 13 1/2 -month paid leave, at $315,600 a year.
These extraordinary expenditures can't just be explained away as waste, mismanagement or greed; the problem is more fundamental than that. It's all part of a changing business model, a new economics that is driving public colleges nationwide into uncharted, potentially troublesome, waters.
Over the last two decades, public financing for higher education has waned at the same time that education costs (labor, laboratories, health coverage, etc.) have continued to rise. This has forced public colleges nationwide into a competitive marketplace that is threatening public education.
Many college presidents no longer see their state schools as public; they are "state assisted." Over the last four years, UC absorbed a 16% reduction in state funding while student enrollments rose by 16%. Nationwide, even flagship state universities are struggling to compete against private colleges that have endowments and can charge whatever tuition the market will bear.
To make up for state budget shortfalls, public colleges have turned to private donors, the federal government and corporations for a larger share of their operating funds -- and boosted tuition and fees.
From 1993 to 2003, industry-sponsored research in the UC system grew from $65 million to $155 million -- meaning that public higher education more and more is driven by what private interests and business will pay for, and less and less by the public interest or the needs of students
"If private donors and corporations are providing much of a university's budget," said a former president of the University of Wisconsin, "then they will set the agenda."
