mortiz055

I'm sorry to rain on the parade, but even though the state continues to recover, UC does not. In November 2014, Gov. Brown offered UC a 4 percent increase in state funding, or $119.5 million.  The UC Regents countered with their famous 5 percent tuition increase, which would have added another $131 million (not counting financial aid revenue from the state).  That might sound like a lot of new revenue, but it isn't. Were both pieces in place, UC would be getting about half of the16 percent annual increase it had estimated it needs for several years running to recover from the Schwarzenegger and the Brown cuts. See my November post on the Regents meeting for context and for UCOP's chart on the subject. There are various ways to describe the problem: it   is a $1.5 billion structural deficit (2011 values) or it is the $1 billion in cuts since 2008 that CFO Brostrom uses in public statements. A third way is even more ominous: the last Independent Audit Report of UC's fin...

By Stanton A. Glantz, Professor of Medicine, UCSF Chris here: This piece was written for a daily newspaper. There would be a much better public discussion, or what we used to call in the fifth grade "a fair fight," if it and similar piece would actually appear in one of them.  Once, California had abundant water and few recognized the challenge of global warming.   . Governor Brown, recognizing that it is impossible to simply roll back the clock on these problems, is leading California to confront this changed reality   with enormous efforts that have uncertain outcomes. But there is one problem in which the governor could roll back the clock to when California worked better: higher education. Once, California’s three sector system of higher education – its Community Colleges, California State University, and the University of California – formed a high quality integrated system of accessible opportunity in which any California student could find an appropriate seat to ad...

Labour had a bad night in the UK's parliamentary elections, but it was not a victory for the Conservatives' core policy of permanent public sector austerity.  Scotland gave the Scottish Nationalist Party (SNP) 56 of 59 Scottish seats in Parliament, a gain of 50 overnight, thus declaring independence without leaving the union. The SNP is among other things dead set against London austerity, as you can hear in Mhairi Black's speech celebrating her victory over Scottish Labour lion Douglas Alexander, one of the architects of Labour's failed national campaign. Scotland punished Labour for aligning with the Tories against the independence referendum.  The UK punished Labour for aligning with the Tories for austerity, finding their Austerity Lite brand a muddled non-alternative to Cameron and Osborne. On higher ed, Labour's Ed Miliband had promised to roll back one part of the Conservative university revolution (if you're playing catch-up, one primer is my LARB revie...