California State University will raise its tuition by 15 percent by the 2011-12 academic year despite receiving a healthy increase in state support last month. The system’s Board of Trustees approved the increase today after officials said it would be necessary to raise enrollment and prepare for continuing state budget deficits in the future. With the move, tuition at Cal State will be 60 percent higher next year than it was just two years ago.
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Raise enrollment? Shouldn’t they reduce enrollment. Thousands of students are already facing the “admitted but denied” phenomenon, where students are admitted but can’t find any open courses and end up transferring/dropping out. Wouldn’t lowering enrollmetn also lower costs? Economies of scale are really only feasible up to a point in education; at a certain capacity economies are gone and all that’s left is scale. This is what is happening now and it is plain to see by the amount of cuts and raises in tuition that adding more and more students, which CSUs do every year, IS NOT SOLVING ANY PROBLEMS.
“Economies of scale are really only feasible up to a point” is true in any operation, not just education. Here lies the fundamental flaw with the education paradigm; not everyone should be college bound. We have lowered the standard with the idea that everyone should go to college; it will make for a better society. Our education system was crippled years ago when high schools stop offering trade courses. We eliminate a viable alternative to college. I put the blame squarely on the unions, all of them. The teachers union should have created alliances with similar actionable organizations (e.g. the iron workers or carpenter unions) instead of becoming bureaucratic lobbyist. The combined hundreds of millions of dollar spent each year in capitols could have built and staffed new shop classes. These apprenticeships would have bolstered union membership and created a better class of skilled works. Now we outsource many jobs because we don’t have the workers to perform the needed tasks. Try looking for a decent cabinet maker. In the meantime, union membership is declining since the only value added is through collective bargaining which offering limited benefit as a whole. Unions need to change before it’s too late. They should start implementing skilled high school programs and stop spending their patron’s dues on wooing some politician.
I was a Cal State grad and after finishing in 2004 and then going out of state for Grad School and staying to work there I say it is only a matter of time before students start or continue to look out of state for their education. What is the point of looking at Costs if I have to add a whole year to my program. I can now go out of state and pay the same in 4 years for out of state (Western Undergraduate Exchange states) than 5 years of CSU tuition. Wake up CSU it will not be long before these students figure it out. The same for Community College students…you can now go out of state to community colleges in WUE states and get the classes you need. I hate to run students out of California and make it worse but to their benefit out of state is looking more affordable every day.
fm114fm – I’m very sympathetic to your post. But, it leaves out more technical jobs such as the sciences.
In general, undergraduate school seems like a bad place to learn the practical and necessary parts of research and experiment (focused research with unknown answers, etc…). A real apprenticeship at a company or in an institution would be better for everything but breadth of knowledge. Partnerships between universities -for the lecture content -, and institutions -for the practical content -would be far better than the after-graduation internships that take place now.