The University of California Board of Regents will likely take a long-awaited vote on a proposed increase in student fees when they convene at their bi-monthly meeting in mid-July, according to the UC Office of the President.
The regents were supposed to vote on a fee increase at their May meeting after Gov. Gray Davis’ state budget draft cut a base sum of $300 million from the UC for 2003-2004. It became clear that, even with substantial cuts in other programs, students would shoulder part of the financial burden.
However, the vote was delayed pending further information on the state budget. Instead, the regents voted unanimously to support Davis’ budget as it was presented in its May Revision with hopes that later revisions would not further cut the university’s budget.
With the state budget deadlocked due to bipartisan squabbling, and the governor preoccupied with a Republican-driven recall effort, it is not certain that the state will have a budget by the time the regents meet at UC San Francisco from July 16 to 17.
But the regents will most likely vote on the fee increase anyway, said Hanan Eisenman, a press aide for UCOP.
“We do expect to go to the July regents meeting with a fee proposal,” he said. “We want to give students sufficient notice of fee levels so they can adjust for the winter and spring quarters.”
The big question for the regents now is just how much of a fee increase will hit students’ wallets.
The regents will be looking at a possible increase of $795, which would be on top of a $495 increase made during the spring quarter of 2003. This would bring the average level of undergraduate student fees to $4,629.
Given miscellaneous fees that individual campuses charge, undergraduates will pay an average of $5,082 in fees.
However, additional proposals in the state legislature could cut the UC’s budget by an additional $80 to $400 million, which would be equivalent to the total state funding for UC Berkeley.
An increased cut in funding to the university would also increase the amount student fees are raised, a scenario that Eisenman said was “possible,” but also a scenario with which the UC would not be pleased.
“The UC would be very concerned with further cuts. We feel we’ve taken very substantial cuts in our programs already,” he said.
It is not yet clear if the outpouring of student sentiment will be as strong at the July regents meeting as it was at the May one, when over 100 students from six different UC campuses protested raising student fees, much to the chagrin of the regents and the UC Police Department.
Yousef Tajsar, a fourth-year political science student at UCLA who helped organize the May protests, said student leaders from various universities will meet to discuss a course of action for July.
Tajsar added that students were “very disappointed” that the regents had turned down student requests to hold their meeting at UCLA, instead deciding to hold all but one of their meetings next year at UC San Francisco, a campus that protesters have called remote and inaccessible to students.
“It’s really unfortunate that instead of them trying to improve on that situation, they decided to go against what (students) were saying,” he said.