Palo Alto High School graduates attending University of California schools are responding with anger and frustration, and in some cases grim acceptance, toward the 32-percent tuition increase approved by UC regents on Thursday.
The increase, decided by a vote of 20-1, will raise undergraduate tuition from $7,788 to $10,302 next fall, and a 15-percent increase will begin this January, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Laura Mitchell, a 2005 Paly graduate who attends UC Davis, said she was outraged by the tuition hike.
“It makes it impossible for an entire demographic of students to afford college education, which I think is essentially criminal,” Mitchell said.
Other Paly graduates responded similarly to the tuition increase.
“I understand that sacrifices have to be made given the circumstances, but to me it seems like the last thing we should be cutting is public education,” said 2009 graduate Grace Morrison, who attends UC Santa Barbara. “It doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Students are extremely angry,” Morrison continued. “It seems like there’s less of an incentive to choose public education; you’re paying more and more each year for tuition with fewer classes to choose from. It’s ridiculous.”
Students staged protests on many of the UC campuses, including demonstrations at UCLA, UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, in response to the tuition hike.
At UCLA, students and workers from across the UC system converged to shut down the regents meeting on Wednesday, stopping the meeting at least three times and resulting in the arrests of 14 students, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. Thursday’s UCLA protest was more peaceful, with students only interrupting the meeting once and the police only making two arrests.
[[nid:12011]]On Thursday, approximately 200 students protested at UC Berkeley’s Wheeler Hall, resulting in the temporary suspension of classes, according to an e-mail the chancellor sent students. The e-mail also said that fire alarms had been intentionally set off in several buildings including Barrows, Dwinelle, and Sproul Hall.
“There was a big protest at Wheeler Hall,” 2009 graduate Seung-Yeon Choi, who attends UC Berkeley, said Friday. “People are being pepper sprayed. There is a big caution tape around the building and classes have been canceled from what I’ve heard.”
The protest and occupation of Wheeler Hall lasted for about 11 hours, ending in the arrests of 40 students, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nolan Wong, a 2009 graduate who attends UC Berkeley and does not support the protests, said the demonstration interrupted his classes.
“All Friday morning, the chancellor was warning us by email to avoid Wheeler Hall, and I am fairly certain that the protesters were behind the fire alarms at nearly every other building going off constantly Friday morning,” Wong said. “My math GSI [graduate student instructor] couldn’t even finish his lecture because a fire alarm went off in Evans [Hall] at the start of class, then 20 minutes into class.”
At UC Santa Cruz, students blocked campus entrances and occupied the administrative building, according to 2006 graduate Rosalie Bergen, who attends UC Santa Cruz.
“It [the protesting] just shut down campus on Wednesday,” Bergen said. “I didn’t need to go to campus, but my housemates tried to get up there and couldn’t talk to any of their advisers and couldn’t get to class. It was pretty hectic.”
Students held a peaceful protest at UC Davis’ Mrak Hall on Thursday night in response to the tuition increases, according to Mitchell, who said 52 students were arrested and held until Friday morning.
UC Davis student Laura Thatcher was among the students arrested Thursday.
“On Thursday around 1 [p.m.], people started to gather around Mrak Hall, and we stayed there all day talking about what happened,” Thatcher said. “There were over 300 people there and everyone was really well-informed. There were a lot of drums and people kept chanting. An administrator spoke to us and tried to answer our questions. The police gave us warnings that we needed to leave at 5 p.m., when the building closes, but we stayed there until about 7:30, which is when they [police officers] started to make the actual arrests. They arrested us one by one, after reading us our rights.”
[[nid:12009]]Thatcher said that she felt the students should have been allowed to protest.
“We go to school here and feel that school is public property,” Thatcher said. “We didn’t feel like we were breaking the law. They charged us with trespassing, but we felt that we were supposed to be allowed to be there. The whole experience was dehumanizing, but also empowering because we were there for a reason that we all believed in. We had a lot of strength in numbers.”
Nicole Kota, another UC Davis student arrested at the Mrak Hall protest, said that the protests weren’t important only for UC Davis, but for all of education.
“Part of the reason why I agreed to be arrested is that people need to understand that this isn’t just about me or UC Davis,” Kota said. “I’m a fourth year and planning on graduating this year, and it’s not going to affect me that much; it’s a bigger issue — it’s going to affect posterity. The whole world is watching this. Even students in Croatia and Vienna are with us in solidarity. This act wasn’t just for us — it was for our friends and even people who don’t go to UCs; it was for all education.”
Mitchell feels the protests are the most effective way to voice student opinions.
“I think that protests are a great way to deal with this kind of situation,” Mitchell said. “Students have tried to make their voices heard in other ways, but basically they [the administrators] refused to hear it. At this point we’re using the tools that we have available to us.”
Other students said that the protests are important, but question their practicality.
“I think it’s really important for students to actively participate in the protests, but at the same time a bunch of students chanting and waving signs isn’t going to make a ton of money appear in the budget,” Morrison said.
“I think it’s nice to show solidarity with the rest of the UC system,” Bergen said. “But I think with protesting you have to be really careful because there was another protest after Wednesday that didn’t get violent, but protesters overstepped some boundaries and blocked fire exits. I think once you start pushing those kinds of boundaries you start to lose some of your say, because people do not want to take you as seriously when you are putting other people in danger.”
[[nid:12010]]Wong agreed with the ineffectiveness of the protests and said that demonstrations send the wrong message to administrators.
“Such forms of protest which involve barricading a building and possibly pulling fire alarms all over campus are inappropriate and send the message to administration that we’re still a bunch of rash young adults,” Wong said. “If you want to picket, fine. But please, don’t interrupt class time, because that’s interrupting university functions.”
At many UC campuses, the effects of state budget cuts have been noticeable for a while.
“The budget crisis has certainly held a looming presence over campus,” said 2009 graduate Connie Yang, who attends UC Berkeley. “There have been a lot of direct consequences of the budget cuts such as shorter hours for libraries and dining commons. I’ve also heard of a lot of professors and GSIs feeling pressured to conserve basic resources in the classrooms — some as basic as chalk.”
Yang said that the budget cuts have also influenced the atmosphere of the campus.
“I’ve definitely noticed a general feeling of anxiety around campus this entire semester so far,” Yang said. “I personally hadn’t realized the extent to which the budget crisis had affected so many different groups on campus until I attended a ‘Student Town Hall with the Chancellor’ two weeks ago, and felt the frustration in the air as groups asked the chancellor and executive vice chancellor for answers.”
Student efforts on UC campuses went beyond protesting, according to Yang.
“Members of the ASUC [Associated Students of University of California] have been on Sproul Plaza over the past few weeks, asking students to write down their responses to the budget cuts, and taking pictures of these responses,” Yang said.
For many students, the main concern about the state budget cuts is the steadily decreasing number of classes available.
“The biggest thing that concerns me is class selection,” Morrison said. “Because of the budget cuts, they’ve rolled back on the amount of classes offered each quarter, but there’s still the same amount of students so classes fill up in the blink of an eye.”
“I’m a psych major, and the psych department has been having to cut classes and faculty,” Bergen said. “A lot of people aren’t able to take classes right now because they just don’t have enough space.”
Mitchell said that the budget cuts mean that the level of education will drop throughout California.
[[nid:12012]]“We absolutely need the support — not only of students at Paly, who are potentially going to be applying to UCs and trying to get a good college education,” Mitchell said. “Most Paly students are fortunate in that they can afford to go to a four-year institute, but it’s also about the quality of education at UCs, which have a long-standing history of quality education, and that’s really jeopardized when we see budget cuts and cut faculty. … It’s really an across-the-board lessening of the level of education offered to students in California.”
Many students feel the tuition increases are unfair because similar cuts are not being made from administrators’ salaries, according Choi.
“I was very disappointed that they [the regents] decided to increase our fees by 32 percent because a lot of this money is going towards larger paychecks for the chancellor and colleagues,” Choi said.
Despite the widespread protests, other students, including 2008 Paly alumnus and current UC Davis student Zal Dordi, say that the tuition increases are necessary to maintain the UC system.
“My opinion on the matter is that these cuts in the budget and increases in fees are necessary for the survival of the UC system,” Dordi said. “California’s state fiscal crisis is not going away any time soon and as regrettable that it is to make such large cuts in public education, it is necessary to do so in order to get the state, and more specifically the UC system, out of this crisis.”
Others, including Wong, noted that the price for UCs is still significantly less than tuition for private colleges.
“Because despite the 32-percent fee hike, we are still paying substantially less than a private college,” Wong said. “The school fees alone for a private college can hit at least $30,000, and after the 32-percent fee hike, we’re still only paying a third of that.”
Michael Bloch, a 2009 graduate attending UC Berkeley and a leading member of ASUC’s Budget Crisis Task Force, said that the budget problem must be dealt with immediately.
“The budget cuts are affecting all three California state school systems: the UCs, the CSUs and the community colleges, and without fixing this problem as quickly as possible, it will be more difficult for high school students to get into the schools they want, pay for their tuitions, and overall, the quality of our education system will degrade,” Bloch said.
Editor’s note: Bloch, Yang and Mitchell are former editors-in-chief of the Paly Voice. Reporter Cee-Ning Wong contributed to the newsbrief, which was the basis of this story.