Pauley Pavilion: UCLA responds
UCLA has decided against using $15 million in student fees that students voted to spend on renovating two campus buildings (not Pauley Pavilion.) Read about the decision here: UCLA diverts student fees from Pauley Pavilion renovation. Read the earlier article that stated UCLA would put the $15 million here: State universities tap student fees for unintended projects.
I still have a few questions:
- Is the controversy over spending student fees on construction, period, or is the controversy over spending fees students voted to spend on construction other than renovating Pauley Pavilion?
- The later article states that how the $15 million will be used has not been decided. Why is that money not going toward the purpose voted on?
- Was it lawful for UCLA to plan on using the $15 million for a purpose other than what was voted on?
News: “Sports mortgages,” Student fees fund construction, Community colleges get attention but need money
Hell-raisers, Standpatters, Peacekeepers and the Meister Controversy
People involved the University of California budget crisis controversies fall into three categories: the Hell-raiser who disagrees with seemingly all of the university’s financial decisions, the standpatter who defends those decisions like they’re his lifeline, and the peacekeeper trying to reconcile apparent opposites, which usually results in even more Hell-raising and fervent standpatting than before.
Okay, that’s oversimplifying things a bit—there’s a lot more nuance to these people than I’m admitting here. People change roles. The standpatter archetype best fits the stereotypical reactionary administrator, but some administrators dip their toes into peacekeeper or even Hell-raiser territory when they point out areas of improvement for UC. Likewise, the Hell-raiser sometimes finds common ground with the standpatter and emerges as a peacekeeper.
Still, there’s a grain of truth in these archetypes and they loosely fit people debating the crisis. Let’s apply them to this week’s episode of the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future*: the Meister Controversy. But first, some background information:
What is the Meister Controversy?
In October, UC Santa Cruz Professor Bob Meister wrote an open letter to students titled, “They Pledged Your Tuition,”** which stated that student fee hikes increase the university’s capacity to sell bonds, drawing an association between the university’s debt capacity and the debt taken on by students and their families.
“UC recently sold more than $1.6B in highly rated bonds one month after declaring an ‘extreme financial emergency,’ ” Meister wrote, adding, “[Student] tuition is UC’s #1 source of revenue to pay back bonds, ahead of new earnings from bond-funded projects, which do not even come second … Because UC pledges 100 percent of tuition to maintain its bond rating, it has also implicitly assured bond financiers that it will raise your tuition so it can borrow more.”
Meister’s assertion that student fees are pledged as collateral for bonds inspired students, faculty and others to question whether the UC ever actually used student fees to service bond debt. UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz (physics) summarizes this response in the write-up that accompanied his presentation Tuesday:
Student Fee revenues are put at risk, through the General Revenue Bonds program, to support construction projects throughout the University of California (UC); and top UC officials appear stubbornly negligent regarding their oversight responsibilities. When we asked whether students’ Educational Fees have ever been spent to pay for campus construction projects the official answer came in two contradictory parts:
a) To the best of our knowledge, there has never been such an occasion.
b) The University does not record the data needed to answer that question.
An overview of the meeting
The seminar was moderated by UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor for Budget Erin Gore and started off with tame (but informative) presentations by Schwartz and UC Berkeley professors Stanley Klein (optometry) and Bob Jacobsen (physics).
UC Chief Financial Officer Peter Taylor was the last scheduled speaker and focused on claims that the UC may use student fees to service bond debt, which he attributed to UCSC Professor of Political Science Bob Meister’s paper. After he spoke, Meister was given an opportunity to respond.
“The Meister Controversy is about a controversy I didn’t actually raise because there is no data,” Meister said, explaining that the focus of his paper was on the relationship between the debt capacity of the UC and debt expectations for students and families, not on whether student fees might be used to finance construction.
Yes, those last two portions of the meeting were just as intriguing they sound.
Here I will summarize each presentation separately, in the order it was given. I advise you to read the summaries of Taylor’s and Meister’s presentations together because those speakers responded to each other.
The Peacekeepers
UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz (physics)
Schwartz’s presentation focused on the Meister Controversy and served as an introduction for the presentations that followed. (See his write-up, which contains all the information he shared.) He and Klein presented proposals for how the university manages financing for construction projects. (Professor Alan Schoenfeld (education) co-authored the proposal. Klein wrote the amendment to proposal 2 at the bottom of the page.)
Read the proposals here:
Seeing Schwartz in the position of peacekeeper is surprising for anyone familiar with his reputation for (very loudly) blowing the whistle on non-transparent UC practices. Taylor, who said he agreed with parts of the professors’ proposal, observed this change of tone and remarked to Schwartz, “Either I’m getting old or you’re getting more mellow.” I doubt Schwartz is going be pigeonholed as a peacekeeper, though.
UC Berkeley Professor Stanley Klein (optometry)
Klein presented on the dilemma of trying to balance transparency with fungibility, or the ability to transfer funding between different expenses. (See his power point presentation here.)
Klein asserted that fungibility and transparency are not mutually exclusive. (This is completely the opposite of what Schwartz said during the Transparency 101 presentation in seminar a few weeks ago.)
According to Klein, fungibility can be a good thing because having fewer funds that apply to more purposes saves money by necessitating fewer administrators to oversee funding allocation than would be needed if university finances were split up into a greater number of funds.
He added, however, that fungibility can lead to confusion. For example, pledged external sources, or collateral for debt, are not the same as repayment sources for debt.
“When there’s confusion there are problems,” he said.
Klein presented the proposals he, Schwartz and Shoenfeld came up with as a way of finding equilibrium between transparency and fungibility and thus get faculty and administrators “on the same page.”
“There might be ways that we can have our cake and eat it too,” he said.
In addition to the two proposals, Klein suggested an amendment that included tapping into endowments to fund some construction projects and taxing high-salaried employees.
UC Berkeley Professor Bob Jacobsen (physics)
Jacobsen found information about the entire life cycles of nine construction projects at UC Berkeley. He presented on how renovations of Barrows and Stanley hall were funded and executed. (See his power point presentation here.)
In his presentation, Jacobsen emphasized the high degree of detail in the UC’s documents related to construction.
“They don’t stint on this stuff,” he said, explaining that whenever the regents use state money, they say exactly where it is coming from and who has pledged it.***
Jacobsen explained different types of funds that go toward construction (further explanation in his power point):
- University Opportunity Fund—an agreement with the state that dictates how federal reimbursement funds for construction must be allocated.
- Research Overhead—reimbursement money from the state for research conducted in a building and as a result of its construction can go toward funding that construction project
- Funds that function somewhat like endowments—i.e. they are invested the way endowments are but the principal part of the fund (the non-interest part) can be spent by the university.
The Standpatter and the Hell-raiser
UC Chief Financial Officer Peter Taylor
See Taylor’s power point presentation here for data about bonds and construction and other interesting points of information.
Taylor has been CFO of UC for about 11 months now. The UCLA alumnus said he spent 17 years as an investment banker before coming to UC.
Taylor complained about people taking “pot shots” at the UC without giving administrators a chance to respond, but added that Schwartz is diligent about trying to get the facts right.
Then he dug into Meister.
“Let me be crystal clear for probably the 800th time,” Taylor said. “We do not use student tuition to pay for construction debt service.”
Taylor said student fee hikes and increases in bond debt are not interdependent, later adding that Meister never used any evidence to prove student fees are used to pay for construction.
“Why is this paper posted on the web giving students and parents wrong information?” he asked.
Taylor explained that student payments go toward debt accrued by auxiliary enterprises such as housing and parking, but clarified that those payments are not student fees. I think he was referring to students paying to live in the dorms, etc.
The CFO went on to defend the university’s construction projects in response to claims that money spent on them could be allocated elsewhere. He said that if capital projects aren’t built, the university won’t gain revenue from them.
“It is inaccurate to say that 80 percent of those revenues [from building projects] are going to show up without building those projects,” he said.
I’ll have to ask for some clarification about the building revenue arguments. I think he was responding to claims that money spent on buildings could go elsewhere by explaining that the money that would, theoretically, go elsewhere is actually the revenue from the projects once they are fully built and in use.
Taylor ended his presentation by addressing transparency issues. He said Schwartz, Klein and Schoenfeld’s proposal for “regular, detailed reporting regarding debt service coverage” (quoted from the proposal) was satisfied by an item passed by the UC Regents about a year ago. According to Taylor, the item**** will be implemented by no later than the July UC Regents meeting.
“Going forward [the capital projects approval process] will be clearer and easier to understand,” he said. “Through additional transparency people will feel a little more comfortable and at ease.”
UCSC Professor Bob Meister
Meister’s main beef was that a controversy was being attributed to him that he claims he didn’t start.
“I never said that there was data showing how construction funds were actually serviced,” he said. “My interest is in the relationship between UC’s debt capacity, which is necessary in order to privatize the way it wants to, and individual student and family debt capacity in society.”
Meister called this relationship the “kernel of privatization”:
“UC’s financial plan for growth is a reflection … of what is wrong with that model of financing education.”
Meister spoke extensively about the Bond Indenture authorized by the UC Regents in July 2003 that went into effect in 2004. In his paper, he writes:
By pledging “General Revenues” as security for each UC revenue bond, the Regents are pledging everything that they can, including tution. This means that when any source of General Revenue goes up—including tuition and fees—UC’s ability to borrow on private capital markeys goes up, and its dependency on state capital funding goes down. After 2004, any revenues produced by a bond-funded contract would be added to General Revenue (unless this were limited by that contract); but any such projects could also be subsidized by each other, or by revenues from sources such as tuition, student activities, grant “overhead,” endowment, etc.
“Students get it. Students get that that was the point of my article and that’s what I would like the Meister Controversy to be about,” he said Tuesday.
Meister also addressed transparency issues.
“We don’t know how student fees are being used,” he said. “They are not tracked and we don’t know how debt service is being paid.”
Complicating UC’s assertions that it will not use student fees to service bond debt, he says, is a policy passed at last week’s regents’ meeting. The policy clarifies the student fee policy to say that the regents have total authority to set fees at any level and that student fee policies are not contracts with students.*****
Meister described the policy as part of a “complete circle”: the student fee policies were the reasons the regents weren’t doing things like spending student fees on construction and bond debt and “now that we’ve asked them to show they weren’t violating their own policy, they’ve changed their policy going forward.”
*Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future, an open seminar organized by UC Berkeley Professors Stanley Klein (Optometry), Alan Schoenfeld (Education) and Charles Schwartz (Physics), devoted to research into topics such as construction finance and how the University of California contributes to the state’s economy. The seminar meets Tuesdays from 5-7 p.m. in 489 Minor Hall on theUC Berkeley campus.
**Other commentary and analysis addressing UC finances can be found on my “Commentary and Analysis” page. http://caledinsider.org/faculty/
***Meister said in an e-mail that the projects Jacobsen presented on were completed before 2004, thus exempting them from the Bond Indenture. See the portion of this blog post about Meister’s speech during the seminar.
****I will have to look up what the exact item was.
*****Taylor said this policy was in response to the UC losing a lawsuit by former students who claimed they had read on a UC Web page that fees at their professional schools would not increase while they were in school, but that they experienced fee hikes anyway.
Some additional links related to the UC Regents meeting
A blog titled Student Activism has posted a link to a briefing on the meeting put together by UC Student Regent Designate Jesse Cheng. Cheng will be liveblogging the meeting all three days of it.
An SF Chronicle article about the possibility of the UC Regents changing a policy so they will have the ability to raise fees at professional schools more drastically. According to the Student Activism blog, Cheng has said that this proposal is not reflected in the meeting materials.
Transparency 101, part 2
Tuesday night (March 16) was the second part of UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz’s Transparency 101 presentation. The turnout was much lower than the first part of his presentation, probably due to factors such as midterms and the closeness of spring break. More detailed notes from both parts of the presentation will be up by early next week.
Topics discussed:
- There is a lack of information available about how student fees are spent.
- State funding is referred to as “state education funds” in documents, as opposed to “state education and research funds,” which would more accurately denote how state funding to the UC is spent.
- Administrative growth–Schwartz said middle and upper management positions have grown 200 percent while overall employment has grown by 44 percent.
- Cal Profiles, “an interactive database containing multiple years of institutional data for all UC Berkeley campus units.” (description from the Cal Profiles overview page.)
The seminar also had a heated discussion of a Daily Cal article published today, “Athletics Department May Be in Violation of State Policy,” which states that the athletics department at UC Berkeley may be violating a state policy. People at the seminar said the article is inaccurate. Professor Stanley Klein (optometry), who brought up the topic of the article, said he thinks the title is incorrect but did not specify exactly why. Klein is on a task force that researches UC Berkeley athletics funding.
What do you think?
- How would California citizens feel about their money going towards education vs. education and research?
- Is the Daily Cal article inaccurate?
- Why can only people with student or staff IDs get into Cal Profiles? Should California citizens who are not a part of the university be able to access this information?
Transparency 101
Context: The Transparency 101 presentation was hosted by the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future, an open seminar organized by UC Berkeley Professors Stanley Klein (Optometry), Alan Schoenfeld (Education) and Charles Schwartz (Physics), devoted to research into topics such as the construction finance and how the University of California contributes to the state’s economy. The seminar meets Tuesdays from 5-7 p.m. in 489 Minor Hall on the UC Berkeley campus.
Note: Additional specific questions asked during the Transparency 101 presentation and their answers, if available, will be available in a later post.
***
“Money not formally restricted to its use is fungible,” UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus Charles Schwartz (physics) said. “Fungibility is the antithesis to transparency.”
Schwartz was speaking at a presentation hosted by the Faculty Seminar on UC’s Financial Future Tuesday night (March 9th) called Transparency 101. The presentation consisted primarily of a lecture given by Schwartz about parts of the UC budget and UC financial documents that he considered unclear. His lecture was followed by a response period for UC Berkeley Associate Vice Chancellor (AVC) for budget Erin Gore and AVC for Finance and Controller John Ellis, as well as a question-and-comment period for the audience, which consisted of around 30 to 40 students, faculty and staff.
Disagreements shaped the presentation, but overall it was characterized by a shared interest in inquiry. Everyone seemed to agree that UC finances could be more transparent.
Berkeley Professor Stanley Klein (optometry) emphasized the nuances of views expressed in the seminar, explaining as an example that he disagrees with Schwartz on a number of topics.
“That’s what makes this seminar interesting– different points of view,” he said.
The presence of Ellis and Gore made the presentation particularly unique. UC administrators and non-administrative members of the UC tend to be seen as polarized and uncooperative, but here they were engaging in thoughtful dialogue.
However, there may be a limit to the impact this dialogue can have. While Gore and Ellis can share information about UC finances and may even be able to revise UC financial records to make them more understandable, they have specific responsibilities that are mostly restricted to the Berkeley campus. Their positions have little to no influence over the UC Regents.**
Schwartz, who was clear to direct his criticism of the UC to higher officers such as UC President Mark Yudof, explained that Gore’s responsibilities include Berkeley’s budget planning at the beginning of the fiscal year and Ellis’s include the accounting for the campus at the end.
***
Controversies that figured prominently in the presentation were accounting for unrestricted funding, the classification of funding that goes toward university hospitals and the effect of pay cuts on faculty.
Unrestricted funding
In the quote about fungibility and transparency, Schwartz was referring to the University of California’s unrestricted fund, which is comprised of money pooled together from various sources such as state aid and student fees. Because the funding sources that flow into the unrestricted fund are fungible or not bound to specific uses, no one can pull a dollar out of a student’s fees and say, “This dollar went toward this professor’s salary,” or “This dollar went toward construction.” The uses of unrestricted funds, therefore, are not transparent.
Gore disagreed with Schwartz that fungibility and transparency are irreconcilable, though she admitted that information about how the UC uses its fungible funds is currently not as clear as it could be.
“Just because money is fungible doesn’t mean you can’t see where it’s spent—not to say we’re there yet,” she said.
Classification of funding for hospitals
On the topic of funding for university hospitals, Schwartz said the category “Total Expenditure for Instruction” in UC financial schedules 1D (Berkeley) and 4D (UCLA) is deluding because it does not refer specifically to money spent on teaching activities but also includes money that goes toward things like the salaries of doctors at university hospitals.
A professor in the audience countered that UCLA doctors’ salaries can be considered instruction expenses because the doctors may be educating medical students who are watching their procedures.
Pay cuts
In relation to the controversy over pay cuts, a graduate student asked if UC Office of the President officials could quantify at what level of pay cut faculty would leave their jobs. He recited a “mantra” used by UCOP officials:
“If we don’t pay them enough, then they’ll walk,” he said, and asked at what point the faculty would walk–will a doctor or professor leave after receiving a one percent pay decrease?
A professor responded that Berkeley lost 48 retention cases last year.*
Gore suggested that it’s not just the money that keeps people at the UC and that that various factors create a delicate balance, including a desire to contribute to public education.
“It’s more art than science,” she said. “The fear is always that we don’t want to break Berkeley, we don’t want to break (the) UC.”
The next step
Many topics, such as where the overhead on grants goes, were only touched upon on Tuesday. In order to follow-up on topics that were not thoroughly explored, seminar facilitators and audience members decided to continue the discussion next week, at the March 16 session of the seminar.
“We knew this (presentation) would just be dipping our toes into the issues of fiscal complexity,” Schwartz said.
*I don’t know if “last year” means 2009 or the 2008-09 school year, but it is the phrase the professor used.
Pre-meeting with AVC Erin Gore
About two weeks ago, UC Berkeley graduate student John Stehlin and I had a “pre-meeting” with Associate Vice Chancellor Erin Gore, who is in charge of budget planning for the Berkeley campus. We spoke to Gore about how we would like to go about our research and asked her to recommend UC Office of the President employees to talk to about different topics related to UC finances, ranging from the meaning of the phrase “common good” as it is used in the 2008-09 financial reports to the role of bonds in the UC’s finances and in university finances in general. We also had an opportunity to ask Gore a few of the specific questions compiled by the Education Crisis Research Group*, of which John and I are both members. We e-mailed Gore the questions we didn’t get to or that she could not immediately answer during the meeting.
*The Education Crisis Research Group is referred to as the nameless research group in earlier posts on this blog.
What is the actual cost of instruction?
Erin Gore said this is something she and her colleagues are working on figuring out and that she will get back to us with what data is currently available. The graphs and other visuals from her February 2nd presentation have some relevant information. One needs to keep in mind whether the total or per-student cost of instruction would include both graduate and undergraduate students or just undergraduates, Gore cautioned, explaining that different types of funding and resources go to each type of student. As an example, funding for research can be said to partly go toward graduate students.
What exactly do student fees pay for?
Gore could not give us a break down of exactly how student fees are spent. She said student fees are combined with state aid and are just treated as one of the revenues that come in. The one definite number she could give is that a third of student fee revenue goes toward financial aid. She also said that student fees and state aid largely pay for faculty salaries, which are mainly paid out of the unrestricted fund. (Some faculty salaries are paid out of federal grants.) However, faculty salaries are not tagged or tracked when they are taken out of the unrestricted fund, so there’s no paper trail.
I am unclear about whether all student fees and state aid go into the unrestricted fund. I will have to ask Gore for clarification.
There are also smaller, more specific student fees, such as campus and registration fees, that have somewhat more specific purposes. Campus fees, for example, only go toward a student’s campus and not the UC system as a whole.
The allocation of funds, in general:
Gore recommended the site Cal Profiles to learn more about how funds are allocated. One of the site’s applications is “Allocated Student FTE by Term,” which shows the number of full time equivalent students taking classes in each department, which in turn determines the total amount of money paid out to faculty of each department. (Two part-time students make one full-time student, FYI.)
Questions we did not get to or that Gore could not answer that I e-mailed to her:
Many of the questions below pertain specifically to the 2008-09 financial statements.
From the 2008-09 financial reports: “FTE employees increased by approximately 3,300 in 2009 and nearly 50 percent were for academic and health sciences staff.” What qualifies as academic and health sciences staff, esp. health sciences? What was the number increase for each type? What should we make of lump sums? How do we disaggregate them? What does “supplies and materials” refer to?
What does it mean that the financial schedules feed into the financial report? What are the relationships between different financial documents? What does it mean when one feeds into the other? How might one map the documents and their connections?
Does the entire UC system budget for increased state funding every year? How does the budgeting process itself impact the actual finances of the UC?
Where can one find the specific revenues from medical centers, educational activities, student housing, food service operations, parking? How much do housing/food services cost school, compared to at other schools? (I realize the second part may be something I need to find out by talking to administrators at other schools.)
How does support from federal agencies work? Why does that money come in, how, and where does it go?
National laboratories operate on federally financed budgets. Does that mean they are completely financed by the federal gov.?
What do STIP, TRIP and GEP stand for?
What are ”acceptable levels of risk” (p. 9, 2008-09 financial reports)?
What does revenue from UC medical centers go toward?
March 4th in Berkeley, pre-march-to-Oakland/San Francisco
The March 4th Day of Action and Strike in Support of Public Education was quieter in Berkeley than I expected today, at least the portion of the events I witnessed. I left work around noon to see the protests and was surprised by the calmness of the campus; I might even say I was startled by how un-startling the scene was. Rounding the corner of California Hall, I anticipated cops, signs, slogans, yelling and hollering, but I saw and heard nothing until I’d made my way to the edge of Sproul Plaza, on the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph.
The crowd was much smaller than the 5000 who rallied on campus as part of the walkout on September 24, when students across UC campuses walked out of their classes to demonstrate dissidence with state funding cuts to education and the then proposed, now implemented student fee hikes. According to the Daily Californian’s live blog of today’s protests, the on-campus crowd peaked at 800 around 12:15 p.m. The crowd was also much tamer than the riots spurred by the Wheeler Hall occupation on November 20th.
So tame and quiet was the pre-march-to-Oakland portion of today’s events, many didn’t even notice when the crowd shoved off for Oakland City Hall. A friend of mine who was gathering signatures for the California Democracy Act, which would amend the state constitution so the state legislature can pass the budget with a simple majority vote as opposed to a two-thirds majority, said he’d wanted to go to Oakland with the protestors but they slipped away before he got a chance to join them.
I may have just missed some of the action on campus. The New York Times reported that this morning, about 100 students blocked Sather Gate, the main entrance to campus. However, it sounds like other campuses taking part in the state-wide protests (world-wide according to the March 4th blog) were a bit more rowdy than Berkeley. The Times reported that at UC Santa Cruz, someone’s windshield was bashed in and protests were disruptive enough this morning that police had to turn cars away from the school’s entrances. As quiet as the day’s protests began at Berkeley, though, the Daily Cal’s live blog indicates that energy has started to pick up as protestors—now about 1500 of them—move through Oakland and toward San Francisco. We’ll see how the day turns out.
Pre-March 4th Protest Thoughts
Today, I considered posting about a meeting some students and I recently held with Associate Vice Chancellor Erin Gore, but I realized that would be pretty dry and seem out of place considering the events that will commence at day break. While this site is anything but focused on protests or activism related to the University of California budget crisis, I’d feel like a sham if I didn’t at least acknowledge the March 4th Day of Action. This will probably be the biggest protest I have ever witnessed. I’ve been hearing buzz about the event since November 20th when students occupied buildings across the UC and California State University campuses, including Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley.
The building occupations that took place in November showed me that students in California are not only critical of the current state of public education finances, but they’re passionate enough about their criticism to do something about it. I don’t agree with all their criticisms; I’ve found some of the stands taken by activists to be a bit radical. For example, I don’t see how the fee hikes could be repealed when this semester’s 15 percent fee hike has already been implemented and next semester’s additional 15 percent increase in fees has probably already be factored into the next budget. Still, witnessing the drama of Wheeler Hall inspired me to get serious about the UC budget crisis and approach the situation in my own way, which consists of simply trying to understand it.
I’m not an activist. I don’t walk in picket lines. I don’t wear clothes that indicate my political leanings. I’m hesitant to yell slogans with a crowd or raise my fist in solidarity, and I can’t imagine myself occupying a building. But I respect the people who engage in these activities and I’m glad they do. They provide a necessary reminder for the education community and the citizens of California to question the mechanisms behind the overall decrease in funding for education and the way educational institutions handle their current situations.
Audio recording of Gore’s presentation
Click here to listen to an audio recording of the presentation.
Please note, there is a period of silence at the beginning. A new audio recording without the awkward silence should be posted on the Academic Senate Web site soon.
Click here to download the materials from the presentation (tables, graphs, etc.)
Erin Gore’s Presentation
What the talk was about:
Associate Vice Chancellor Erin Gore gave a 30-minute power point presentation about UC Berkeley’s financial model, where the university gets its money and how it spends it. She spoke at length about how the financial situation of the university has changed since the 2001-02 fiscal year. Here is a Daily Cal article about the presentation.
According to the data Gore presented, UC Berkeley received $390 million from the state during the 2008-09 school year, compared to $497 million in 2001-02, the year UC Berkeley received the most it has ever received from the state. When you adjust for inflation, that amounts to about a $100 million decrease in state funding. While state funding for the university decreased, the student population increased by about 3,600 full time equivalent students. (Two part-time students count as one of the 3,600 full time equivalent students.)
Gore said the combination of decreased state funding and increased student population has led to students receiving 33% less resources per capita than they did in 2001-2, though students now pay 150% more in student fees than they did then.
Gore also explained the differences between certain types of funding, such as restricted and unrestricted, and she talked about the relationships between some UC financial documents, like how data from UC Berkeley’s financial schedule 1A feeds into its financial statements. I’m not completely clear on all the definitions of types of funding or relationships between documents; those are things I’ll need to ask someone from the Campus Budget Office about.
Who was at the presentation, what they said:
A question and comment period followed Gore’s presentation.
Stanley Klein, a UC Berkeley optometry professor, announced a faculty seminar in which members would outline what parts of the UC’s finances they don’t understand as well as they would like and work on fully understanding the UC financial records. (It’s sort of a similar idea to this site.)
Charles Schwartz, who writes University Probe and is a UC Berkeley professor emeritus, had a lot to say. During the presentation, he commented that people should always be asking what numbers mean, where they come from, and whether there is any controversy about them. He was responding to a line in the table, “Berkeley’s Current Funds Revenues, 2008-09.” I think it was the line titled, “Sales and Services of Educational Activities.” He said he didn’t know what the line specifically referred to.
Schwartz made the following claims during the question-and-answer period:
- UC President Mark Yudof lied about some data or made a false statement. (I didn’t catch what.) Either Yudof or someone from UCOP acknowledged that Yudof had lied, but the incorrect data or statement remains on the UCOP Web site.
- There is no way to find out how education fees are spent.
- The number of management positions in the UC has grown disproportionately more than the total number of positions.
Points of confusion:
I have some lingering questions about content from both the Budget Primer and the presentation. You may be wondering why I would list questions I have instead of just finding the answers and posting them when I get them. Well, (1) I think the process of finding out is a valuable thing to show and (2) I think questions can be informative themselves, in a way. One question might make someone think of another question or another type of information to look for.
First, I’ll list the questions I had after reading the Budget Primer:
- Why is UC Berkeley’s spending reported as static? “The University of California, Berkeley spends approximately $1.8 billion per year to fulfill its teaching, research, and public-service missions.”
- “Though unrestricted funds may be spent for any mission-related purpose, all funds, including unrestricted funds, must be spent in ways consistent with regular University accounting and purchasing policies.” (1) What funds are unrestricted? (2) Where can one find the accounting and purchasing policies?
- Does UC Berkeley always budget for an increase in funding? Why or why not?
- One of the “budget principles” is: “Ensure sufficient ongoing funding is available to support ‘common good’ priorities.” How is “common good” defined?
- Another budget principle is: “Increase financial flexibility that promotes fungibility [replaceability] of funding sources.” I’d be interested to see an example of that to illustrate exactly what it means.
- What sort of activities does “activity” refer to, as in activity-based budgeting? (Activity-based budgeting is mentioned on the Berkeley Campus Budget Office Web site.)
Questions I had after the presentation:
- Why is the Hepi Index controversial? What other indexes for calculating inflation are there?
- How can I find numbers related to bonds in financial records such as the UC’s financial statements?
- What is the definition of a financial statement and what part of the budget setting process does it represent? (See “Posted public records” for the financial statements.)
- What is the definition of a financial schedule? (See “Posted public records” for the financial schedules.)
- What are the differences between financial schedules, i.e. “Schedule A” vs. “Schedule B?”
- What are administrative units? How do they work?
- Why are there both general and designated unrestricted funds? Are all unrestricted funds designated in some sense, or only the “designated” ones?
In general, the financial organization of the UC reminds me of this really complicated tape dispenser I use at work: whoever came up with it must be really proud of himself for being an inventor, but everyone who tries to work with it is super peeved. Anyway, that was some food for thought.
Regents Meeting, January 19-21, 2010
Here is the Meeting Agendas and Schedule for the meeting.
Action Item J1 recommends the UC come up with a new Registration Fee policy to be approved at the May 2010 Regents Meeting. (I think) changing the policy could change how registration fees are allowed to be spent. The reasoning behind the recommendation seems to be that the current wording of the policy concerning registration fees is too vague.
From the “background” section of the action item:
The Registration Fee portion of this systemwide policy provides only general guidance regarding appropriate uses of Registration Fee funds, which “may be used to support services which benefit the student and which are complementary to, but not a part of, the instructional program.”
Graduating a year early:
Not just a semester–a whole gosh darn year. It sounds harder than it really is. All you need to do is plan, and you probably won’t have to take more than 16 units a semester. I know a girl who graduated a year early and started law school right after she turned 20. Okay, now that sounds hard, but just getting out early–not so bad. In fact, it’s what I’m planning to do. Graduating a year early can help you save between $10,000 (in-state) and $33,000 (out-of-state.) Here are five steps to make it work:
Step One: Chart Your College Requirements
Look at your college’s requirements. List them on one page. Next to each requirement, write whether or not you’ve satisfied it, and if you have satisfied it, how? I’m in the College of Letters and Science (L&S). Here is my list. Be sure to note the fine print, such as how you can’t satisfy more than two breadth requirements with classes from the same department. The breadth requirement is pretty easy to satisfy since each breadth category can be satisfied by a lot of different classes.
I’ll have to look up whether other colleges at Berkeley have this, but I know L&S has a “senior residency requirement.” Basically, at 90 units, you are considered a senior. You must take at least 24 units in at least two semesters on the Berkeley campus (not through UC Berkeley Extension) after you make it to the 90 unit mark in order to satisfy the requirement. Here is L&S’s description of that requirement:
Senior Residence Requirement
After you become a senior (with 90 semester units earned toward your B.A. degree), you must complete at least 24 of the remaining 30 units in residence in at least two semesters. To count as residence, a semester must consist of at least 4 passed units. Neither Intercampus Visitor, EAP, or UC Berkeley-Washington Program (UCDC) units may be applied to this requirement.
You may use a Berkeley summer session to satisfy one semester of the Senior Residence Requirement, provided that you successfully complete 4 units of course work in the Summer Session and that you have been enrolled previously in the College.
Modified Senior Residence Requirement
Participants in the UC Education Abroad Program (EAP) or the UC Berkeley-Washington Program (UCDC) may meet a Modified Senior Residence Requirement by completing 24 (excluding EAP) of their final 60 semester units in residence. At least 12 of these 24 units must be completed after you have completed 90 units.
(Please note, L&S has other types of residence requirements as well. More information can be found here.)
The senior residence requirement would make it pretty hard for most people to graduate more than a year early, but it still may be possible. The question I’m left with after the description of the requirement is, “What if you meet and exceed 90 units in one semester? Do you still have to be on campus for two semesters, or can you finish 114 (90+24) units on campus, then take your last six units through UC Berkeley Extension? Say you start a summer session at 86 units and end it at 96 units, then take 18 units that fall. Do you still have to pay all those student fees to finish your degree the following spring, or can you take six units or so through UC Berkeley Extension and save thousands of dollars?” I think it’s unlikely a student can do what I’ve suggested in my question, but the description of the senior residence requirement says you can use a summer to satisfy part of it, leaving open the possibility of taking the spring semester off* and finishing your degree over the summer. I’ll have to double check with L&S about these things and get back to you.
Step Two: Stop Waiting to Stop Waiting–Be Proactive with Wait Lists
You’re probably thinking that graduating a year early can’t be as easy as I’m making it out to be, with so many students having to take an extra semester or year to graduate these days due to the ever-decreasing availability of classes. Everyone can count on getting wait listed for at least one class every semester. If you’re wait listed for a class you need to graduate, well … that sucks. One way to better your chances of getting off a wait list is simply e-mailing the professor to express your interest. (I know this advice might sound like a no-brainer, but you’d be surprised how many people just sit back and wait to stop waiting.) Continue e-mailing him or her now and then to check on the state of the wait list in general and try to go to your professor’s office hours. I did that last semester with one of my English classes and I’m pretty sure the professor bumped me up the wait list as a result. He e-mailed me the second week of the semester to ask if I was still attending lecture and informed me that if I came to the next class, he would give me a spot. The class was processed manually, which means the first people to get off the wait list were senior English majors and undeclared freshman got in last or not at all. I was a sophomore English major.
Step Three: Declare Your Major A.S.A.P.
Declaring your major as soon as possible will make it much easier to graduate a year early by allowing you to start completing your major sooner and giving you an advantage on manually processed wait lists. I declared myself an English major at the end of my freshman year. Doing so has helped me get into English courses by placing me higher on manually processed wait lists than people with the same class standing as me or lower. (Decals can also help you climb the wait list ladder by beefing up your unit count.)
I know a lot of people who wait forever to declare their major because, they say, they don’t know what they want to do with their lives. Your major probably isn’t what you’re going to do with your life. If you’re delaying declaring because you don’t want to be bound to something you end up not being terribly passionate about, then pick a major you’re interested in that requires a small number of classes in that department to graduate. The fewer classes you have to take for your major, the more room you’ll have to explore other departments. I’ve regretted being an English major at times because it requires that I take 12 English courses, as opposed to the normal eight to 10 required by most other majors, restricting my ability to explore topics other than literature.
Step Four: Chart Your Major Requirements and Make a Final Plan
Once you’ve declared a major, make a list of your major’s requirements similar to the list you made for your college’s requirements. Here is my list. Naturally, some of the classes you take for your major will satisfy requirements for your college. After you’ve made your two lists, plan out your college career. List what classes you’re taking and what requirements they satisfy. Keep track of units semester by semester. Be sure to consider taking summer classes. Summer sessions can save you a lot of money, especially if you’re an out-of-state student like me; the classes cost the same amount for all UC Berkeley undergraduates, regardless of where you’re from. (Graduate students and visiting students pay more.) Also, there are no additional fees you have to pay like there are in the fall and spring. Here is my graduation plan, semester by semester.
Step Five: Get Your Advisor’s Blessing
Now, make appointments to see both your major advisor and your academic advisor at your college. Ask them to double check that your plan satisfies your graduation requirements. It’s likely that your academic advisor won’t know more than what’s already online, but check in with him or her anyway in case you missed something and for your peace of mind.
Some Pros and Cons
Keep in mind, graduating a year early means you’ll have less time to take the classes you want or get involved with campus activities. You probably won’t get a chance to study abroad, either, unless you do it over a summer. I’ve found, however, that knowing I’m only going to be on campus 75% as long as most people makes me value the resources at Berkeley all the more. I carefully plan each semester, only taking classes I really want to take. As for decreased travel opportunity, with the amount of money I’ll save by not taking that fourth year, there’s no reason I can’t find a travel opportunity less expensive than most study abroad programs after I graduate. I’ll also have a bachelor’s degree that much sooner and can look for employment opportunities abroad.
*Note: If you take time off from school before completing your degree, it impacts the length of your student loan grace period after you graduate. If you spend more than six months out of school or taking less than half the normal course load, you will use up your grace period. After six months, you will have to start paying your loans back, unless you go back to school and apply for an in-school deferment. Then, once you’ve graduated, you will have to start paying your loans back immediately, unless you apply for a determent or forbearance or if you go back to school and get another in-school deferment.
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