The High Cost of Higher Education:
Why does a "tuition-free" public university cost so much?
Senior Miguel Gonzalez at his job as a parking attendant on campus; he has a job lined up in marketing at Wells Fargo when he graduates. Chronicle photo by Lance Iversen |
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Sam Whiting, SF Chronicle Columnist Wednesday, February 9, 2005 ©2005 San Francisco Chronicle Link to the article at SFGate.com It wasn't that long ago -- not as long ago as you'd think -- that UC Berkeley cost $212.50 a quarter. When it went up to $236, there was serious debate in the Daily Cal as to whether it would cause the unfortunate to drop out, at the least, or cause blood in the streets, at the most. It's a quaint story that doesn't mean much in the post-Proposition 13 world of public education. But these numbers mean something: Spread over 30 years, from 1975-76 to 2004-05, Cal has gone from $637 a year to $6,730, an increase of about 1,060 percent. Then as now, education at the University of California is tuition free for residents, a tradition since 1900 that was reaffirmed in the 1960 Master Plan for Higher Education. What students pay are "fees," a sleight of hand similar to the way executives who are fired have always decided to "spend more time with family." It doesn't matter what you call it when a student is paying. A current senior who started as a freshman in 2001-02 has seen his fees rise more than 50 percent, while the Consumer Price Index has risen 8 percent. So inflation as a justification doesn't wash, and neither do comparisons with private colleges or public universities in other states. Comparison shopping doesn't matter to a student who already attends Berkeley. Next year, fees are expected to rise only 8 percent, or $538.40, and that is seen as a great strategic victory for education in the state Legislature. Five hundred dollars may be lunch to a governor who cares more about the Master Tan than the Master Plan, but it's a year's worth of lunches to an undergrad paying his own way. Or even paying part of it. The old adage of someone "working his way through college" no longer exists in the pure sense. With cost of attendance budgeted at $21,538, it's impossible for any 18- to 22-year-old who wasn't a child actor to move away from home and pay his or her way through UC Berkeley. Of the 22,880 undergrads this year, 71 percent are on financial aid, but even students on scholarship are just scraping by. ..... NAME: Miguel Gonzalez AGE: 22 CLASS: Senior HOMETOWN: San Francisco Miguel Gonzalez's room in the Carlton on Telegraph Avenue gets no light. To check the weather before class, he has to go down the hall and down the stairs to look through the window in the front door. This is what $400 a month affords -- half the cost of a room in the Moscow-style dorms below Telegraph. Half the amenities, too, but you can't beat it for convenience, being a short half-block from campus. Should he be in the market for jewelry, a man with a table is set up right outside his front door. Should he be in the market for takeaway, Blondie's Pizza is on one side of his door, and Crepes A-Go-Go is on the other. But cheap fast food is too expensive for Gonzalez. He eats MRMs -- meals ready to microwave -- that cost $2.50 each. Two a day plus cereal for breakfast keeps his food cost to $5 or $6 a day, so long as he doesn't mind doing dishes in the sink down the hall. His room is about the size and has the charm of a medium-security prison cell. "Some people don't like sharing a bathroom," he says. "But I don't mind it. It's kind of like living in a dorm." Not as clean, though. "I don't know if there's a mice problem, but there definitely are roaches, " he says. Since Gonzalez arrived as a freshman in the Spens-Black tower, his living experience at Cal has been one of continuing lowered expectations -- and they weren't that high to begin with, coming from Balboa High School, where homework was often canceled on account of there not being enough books to take home. The advantage to coming from the San Francisco public school system is that he qualified for a Meritus College Fund scholarship of $3,000 a year. Between that and a Cal Grant ($1,000 based on GPA) and Pell Grant ($1,000 based on need), it covered the fees of $4,046 when he started as a freshman. Financial aid covered his room and board of $11,500, and a half-time job as a dorm security monitor from 5 p.m. to 2 a.m. paid $8 an hour to cover the gaps. Then, before his junior year, the aid package dropped, and his own liability rose, first by $1,000 a semester, then $2,000. Technically, it is $1, 000 from the student and $1,000 from the parents, though he covers both. His family emigrated from Managua, Nicaragua, where Gonzalez was born, and they're just getting by. "My parents don't really help me out," he says. He's taken student loans, but tried to resist, deciding to reduce his budget instead. "For example, living in a room like this," he says, lounging on his single bed the other afternoon. Or was it the other night? "When the lights are off, I can never tell what time it is," he says. There is a window, but it's at the bottom of a light well and its main function is for him to hear if someone is in the shower on the other side. It's also an ashtray for people on the upper floors. "I don't think I'm sick, but my parents are always telling me I should complain or go get checked out. They think I'm breathing all the filth," says Gonzalez, who is remarkably uncomplaining. His family returned to Managua for his middle school years, and he has seen families live in a room this size. When he moved in, before his junior year, Gonzalez had hopes the Carlton would be collegial. "I thought it would be neighbor-friendly, people leaving their doors open, " he says, "but everyone is in their own little world." The people who drift in and out are mainly from the street. When it is mentioned that there is a guy sitting in the building's doorway with a tattoo on each knuckle, he says, "What about him?'' Nothing out of the ordinary. "There's always random people." Gonzalez played varsity basketball at Balboa, but he never gets to a Cal game. He is always out in the cold somewhere, whenever there is a sporting event, on a stool at a parking lot, making sure only drivers with special passes get in. The pay is now up to $9.38 an hour. In May he will graduate, and thanks to his favorable rating on a summer internship, has a job in marketing at Wells Fargo waiting for him. He'll move home to Daly City to help his parents with rent and food, and six months later he'll start paying off $8,000 in student loans. "I feel fortunate," he says. "I feel that I'm escaping the worst that's still to come for students who have two or three years left." ..... NAME: Brian Sullivan AGE: 21 CLASS: Junior HOMETOWN: San Francisco By his junior year, Brian Sullivan had tried three different strategies to beat the fees at Berkeley. The first was to move out of the dorms and in with his mother in East Oakland to save on housing costs, and work part time as a clerk at Safeway.That didn't cut it, so last year he quit the job and ratcheted his class units up to 22 a semester, on the cost-effective theory that it's the same price whether you take the minimum of 13 units or maximum of 22. But he ran out of money again, so this year he's working full time and has dropped down to seven units. The cost is still the same, but he's allowed to halve his units because he's working full time, and he gets to keep his scholarship of $3,000 a year from the Meritus College Fund. If the strategy works, he'll have $4,000 or $5,000, take a leave from CompUSA and go back to 22 units in the semester that starts later this month. "It's a couple of road bumps. But my eyes are on the prize," he says from his desk in CompUSA on Market Street. It's a long way from where a 21-year-old fraternity president ought to be on a Friday afternoon, and an even longer way from where Sullivan expected to be. "I could have gone to any of the HBCs (historically black colleges), which I wanted to do -- Southern, Howard, Hampton, Grambling," he says. Coming out of Thurgood Marshall High School, his older sister got a full ride to Clark Atlanta from the Omega Boys Club, but Sullivan didn't qualify. And Cal looked a lot better at $2,044 a semester. "I thought it would be cheaper to stay home," he says. "Unfortunately, that first year was my best year, and since then it's just gone up exponentially. Last year it was $2,929 a semester, and this year $3,365. "The first thing they said was that they were going to balance your financial aid and make up for it with grants," he says. "The first year it wasn't so bad. But ever since then, the financial aid for everybody has completely dropped. It happened very fast." One option is for his mother, Valerie Sullivan, a registered nurse at UCSF Mount Zion, to take out a parent loan, which is at a favorable rate but requires immediate interest payments. He didn't want that. "There's enough pressure on my mother already." A student loan has lower interest and doesn't require payments until six months after graduation. He doesn't want that, either. "I knew that I couldn't just keep going into debt to cover the school charges," he says. "I needed to get my finances straight." A double major in linguistics and African American Studies, he is naturally handy with computers, which landed him a job as a corporate representative for business services at CompUSA. After six months his finances were straight enough that he was able to move into his own apartment near Lake Merritt recently as a 21st birthday present. This takes a load off his mother, who lives near the San Leandro border. His rent is $850, but he figures to make it back on gas and BART savings. Last year his fraternity, Theta Phi Psi, nearly won the Greek League tournament for basketball. This year he's not playing and he feels like a stranger on campus. "I'm hardly around. Everybody says, 'Where's Brian been?' In high school I played football and basketball. I don't have any time to play anymore. Nothing." He works Monday, Wednesday, Friday and either Saturday or Sunday. Cal played its first Saturday night football game and he made it to that. "I was up on Tightwad Hill," he says. "I couldn't prioritize a ticket at that time." Epilogue: In the end he couldn't prioritize the job at CompUSA either. Squeezed for hours, he quit last month and is looking for another job. "School comes first," he says. Finish reading the article at SFGate.com ©2005 San Francisco Chronicle |
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Brian Sullivan is working to organize his new one-bedroom apartment near Lake Merritt while juggling his studies at UC Berkeley. Chronicle photo by Lance Iversen |
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