Illustration by Christine Hipp

Our system of higher education has asked much of students lately, mostly in the form of frequent fee hikes and budget cuts. Many have come out against these hikes and cuts through participation in protests across the state, in which riot batons, pepper spray and multiple arrests have fallen on them.

It becomes questionable, then, when University of California president Mark Yudof requests help in lobbying money for the UC. In an email sent May 9, Yudof requested help from “UC Santa Cruz friend[s]” to push Gov. Jerry Brown to include additional funding to the UC in his coming tax plan up for vote in November. Brown’s plan, released Monday, shows that he is facing a near $16 billion gap in the California state budget to fix.

“We need to send a strong message to the state’s political leaders to spare UC from cuts in the 2012–13 budget and to recommit to making higher education a state priority,” Yudof said.

Asking students for help can be difficult when those asking have cut students’ resources and raising fees so often. In fall 2009, the UC Board of Regents approved a 32 percent increase in fees. A subsequent 8 percent hike passed that November. Another 9.6 percent fee increase passed July 14, 2011. Now, the board is considering an additional 6 percent increase this coming fall, if Brown does not increase funding by $125 million.

The regents have suggested the budget crisis was caused by lessened state support for the UC. While lessening support undoubtedly plays a major role in our budgetary deficit, leaders of the UC have continued plunging forward with larger construction projects and larger still administrator salaries. This is why the regents must continue looking for alternative solutions to our budgetary crisis. Raising student fees, cutting worker’s benefits and admitting more students alone cannot solve our budget crisis.

The regents should take into serious consideration the Fix UC plan, a student investment proposal developed by the editorial board of UC Riverside’s newspaper, The Highlander. Fix UC proposes that students pay fees through a percentage of their yearly income after graduation instead of a yearly tuition-based system.

If the budget crisis is dire enough that regents must ask for assistance, we are left to wonder why administrators are not cutting their own salaries. According to an article in the daily web magazine Slate, UC Davis Chancellor Linda Katehi makes $400,000, as base salary.

In November of last year, 10 university administrators and lawyers saw salaries raised by as much as 21.9 percent, according to an article by The Bay Citizen. The UC president himself brings in a salary of $540,000 a year — a good deal more than President Obama earns from his seat in the Oval Office.

While asking students to get involved in their own university’s issues is great, the regents must find solutions other than state support. They also cannot continue raising tuition, a detriment not only to students of low-income families but to the UC Master Plan, which by design allows students of all backgrounds access to higher education.

Illustration by Leigh Douglas

A thinktank of students at UC Riverside have taken on the perennial problem of tuition hikes with a revolutionary funding model.

Released to the public on Jan. 10, FixUC’s Student Investment Proposal outlines a tuition plan under which students would no longer pay up-front tuition costs. Rather, upon entering a career, graduates would instead pay 5 percent of their annual salary to the university for a total of 20 years.

According to the FixUC website, this will generate “nearly three times” the revenue of the current tuition system, and “allow the University of California to reduce its dependency on unreliable state funding.”

Drafting began last April, when editorial board members of UCR’s student-run newspaper The Highlander decided they had had enough of the consequences of California’s budget crisis.

“Every week, we published an editorial [about the state cutting from UC ] … we called on the regents and the student body to change their response strategy,” said FixUC president Chris LoCascio. “Ultimately, it got to a point where we ended up meeting one to two times a week to brainstorm and come up with a plan ourselves.”

The proposal was initially kept under wraps to prevent premature criticism.

“Once we had the core ideas, we essentially poked holes in it, and kept thinking about how it wouldn’t work,” LoCascio said. “We spent a lot of time coming [up] with solutions for [the complexities].”

Although the group initially didn’t present the plan to the general UC Riverside student body, the group approached several administrators and professors for input, and pursued research of their own.

Alex Abelson, a FixUC Data analyst and fourth-year economics major, obtained statistics from UC, IRS and U.S. Department of Labor records, and used some of his own field data.

“I took the core idea of [a fixed-percentage graduate contribution] and found the numbers,” Abelson said. “I went through what the university was making, and what would be a reliable amount of contribution that would sustain the university.”

Erik Green, UCSC’s Graduate Student Association president, said he supports students looking for solutions.

“’I’m really encouraged to see a truly radical funding model,” Green said. “Rather than the system we have now, which is based on the assumption that students will graduate and get jobs … It moves towards actual statistics and data.”

Repeatedly referencing a “worst-case scenario,” the proposal assumes a mere 60 percent employment rate at $50,000 annual salary for the first 10 years of employment.

“If you look closely at our figures, you will see we were very conservative,” LoCascio said.

Stephen Lee, Riverside’s Associate Student Body president, teamed up with FixUC in the fall to help with outreach. He arranged a meeting with Chancellor Timothy P. White, and has contacted the student leadership of other campuses. All, he said, have been very encouraging and have urged them to “keep going.”

“I can’t say I support every detail in the proposal,” said UC student regent Jonathan Stein in an email. “But it’s awesome that students have begun to think outside the box about budget solutions at the UC, and have stopped waiting for the administration to come up with all the answers for them.”

The proposal has already met scrutiny and skepticism, but its authors stress the importance of open dialogue and honest compromise.

“I think this is really the highest level of student that UC was created for,” Lee said, “to not only be very educated … but to really understand all of that knowledge, and stand up for it and fight.”

Photo by Morgan Grana

Third-year transfer student Brittney Bevelaqua wants to be a philosophy and history professor, run for Senate and own her own coffee shop.

However, she can’t teach philosophy if she can’t even learn about it herself.

As a transfer, she has scrambled to make contacts with professors and get major requirements out of the way.

The philosophy department’s loss of three professors at the beginning of the quarter threatens her love for the subject. Her passion for learning and broadening her philosophical perspectives is not limited to her own education. She is concerned for the education of her fellow students and the quality of the philosophy department.

“It complicates students’ [education] because they’re not getting what they’re paying for,” Bevelaqua said. “It complicates professors’ [work] because they can’t teach the youth who want to be the future.”

Bevelaqua discussed why she wants philosophy to be a part of her own future.

“I want to teach philosophy because it can explain not only events, but inner monologues people toil with,” Bevelaqua said.

The dwindling exposure to different professors’ viewpoints and interpretations leaves Bevelaqua worried for the educational quality of the philosophy program.

“When you’re stifling education, you’re stifling a person’s future and what they love,” she said.

While her own educational experience is threatened, she maintains enthusiasm for the subject. She appreciates the diverse responses to philosophical questions, compared to those in math and science.

“You can approach [philosophy] with so many different answers,” Bevelaqua said. “That’s why I love it.”

Bevelaqua exudes adoration for the subject as she explains how her opinions on the English philosopher John Locke changed after what she was exposed to at UCSC. It is experiences like these that make her appreciate the quality of education she has received and the relationships she has developed with professors.

Bevelaqua is taking two upper-division classes in fall quarter of 2011. She noticed the upper-division classes offered in the fall were cut in half, from six to three, and fears the courses offered in the following quarters will be classes she has already taken.

Bevelaqua says the major is a cycle where fourth-years are always rushing until the very end of their academic careers to enroll in philosophy upper-division courses. Younger students are then left with a limited course variety to choose from.

Now scarce resources also threaten the learning experiences of philosophy majors.

“When you only have three professors teaching, you don’t have a full depth of perspective,” Bevelaqua said.

When she is unable to register for classes through regular enrollment, Bevelaqua said she must utilize her personal skills to get the courses she needs.

“I make lasting and positive impressions so I can create some kind of clout with them so I … can be granted with their grace of letting me take the classes I love,” she said.

She recognizes faculty members are doing everything they can to help their students, such as giving out permission codes. Unfortunately there’s only so much professors and lecturers can do, Bevelaqua said.

Philosophy’s limited course offerings leave Bevelaqua questioning her ability to double-major. She said she wonders if she will have to drop her history major in order to graduate with a degree in philosophy.

“It’s like pulling teeth to get an increase in units,” Bevelaqua said. “Maybe I’m an education masochist trying to do all these things at once.”

While Bevelaqua is doing anything to help her cause, she wonders if the administration is doing the same.

“Would they add another teacher if they could?” Bevelaqua asked. “Or would they just take the cut there?”