Related to your paper

Josh - it's not fair to suggest that students ritualistically show up at Regents meetings to cause trouble. Most R meetings are completely ignored by everyone. When there is a major issue, UC bylaws prohibit faculty from even addressing Regents without going through the office of the president (even chancellors may not speak at R meetings without being invited to do so by a Regent), and students and staff are similarly cut off from meaningful discussion about decisions before they are made in UCOP and generally rubber-stamped by a Board of Regents that has no contact with the day to day life of the campuses. "public comment" sessions must cram 2 months of issues into 2 hours for a university that has 220,000 students.

You conclude with Mark Yudof's claim that 75% of students will pay no more. Assuming he means only the first round, around $600, and say 50,000 of 200,000 non-health students would pay (very round numbers), that yields $30,000,000, or half of what they say they will net. THe claim isn't right. We on the UC faculty have anecdotal evidence of real hardship for students, especially first generation students of color, and has seen statistical drops in continuation rates in Caifornia from 1996-2004 that correlate with the last round of fee increases. This may be better described as worst of both worlds: lots of disruption and financial stress that will reduce educational attainment for not very much financial gain.

Check my numbers, but... it sounds like the protests are over an increast to roughly $10K tuition.

With a quick google, here's what it would cost a California student to attend these universities:

University of Iowa $22,198 (2009-2010)
University of Michigan $34,937 ($11,659 w/Michigan residency)
University of Virginia $29,790 (2008-2009) ($9490 w/VA residency)
Penn State $25,134 to $29,758 (2009-2010) (13K to 17K for PA)

I doubt you could find tuition and fees under $30K at a private university anywhere near UCLA's ranking.

Is this a California thing?

Dear Josh Keller,

I think it's really important to think about the states you list above: Iowa, Michigan, Virginia, Pennsylvania. Some of them have several things in common, which include the drying up of industry (coal, auto, steel, etc) and rampant poverty. More than 10% of the population in most of these states do not have the means to buy food - folks are on food stamps. I lived in a town in MI where 25% did not have enough to eat every day. I think it's really important to go back to the budgets of each of these states beginning in the 1970s and ask a few questions: 1) how much money was allocated to education versus other sectors?; 2) when did the shift from funding education to other sectors happen, and quantitatively, how did it happen? What was going on in the country at that time?; 3) which sectors now absorb most of the public funds and which do not? 4) how does the household and corporate tax structure work - whose getting what and how much?

To simply say that these are the figures for student fees in these states - as if they are completely normal and natural - is the same thing as saying that 1 out of 3 women get breast cancer, which makes cancer completely normal. My point is that the question cannot be, well, these other universities have higher fees so what's the big deal? The question must be, why is it that funds for public education have been massively drying up throughout the US - what are the forces at work that actually bring this into being?

It's really important to get this story straight - I hope you will do some digging and get a hold of the information you need to put the analysis out there. Thank you for your work.