UC Riverside Chancellor Backs 5 Percent Annual Tuition Hikes

UC Riverside Chancellor Kim Wilcox expressed support today for a proposal to hike student tuition by 5 percent every year for the next five years, saying it’s the minimum step necessary to ensure “adequate funding” for the UC system going forward.

“The state economy has rebounded from the recession, and now is the time to re-invest in this and other campuses,” Wilcox said. “The UC system receives $460 million less in state funding than it did in 2007-08, even though UCR and other campuses now serve more students than ever.”

The 26-member UC Board of Regents, meeting at the UC San Francisco Mission Bay Conference Center, is slated tomorrow to begin debating whether to implement the cumulative 25 percent tuition hike systemwide through 2019-20.

The move would amount to $3,102 in additional expenses for students over the current $11,220 base tuition, according to documents posted to the regents’ agenda. A formal vote is expected Thursday.

Wilcox acknowledged that over the last two decades, students and their families have been whipsawed by “wide swings in tuition.”

“The recent financial crisis caused double-digit increases to tuition. At the same time, the funding cuts and resulting budget unpredictability adversely affected all UC campuses,” he said.

“The university and our campus have redoubled efforts to improve operating efficiencies and reduce costs. Here at UC Riverside, after years of belt-tightening, we have firm plans to grow our faculty and student body to further serve our region, the state, and the world.”

UC officials maintain the hikes are necessary to help offset higher pension and salary costs, as well as to help recruit more in-state students. They’ve also said that under the proposal, the tuition hike could be less than 5 percent depending on state funding of the university system.

“This region and the state, our students, and their families, deserve to know that adequate funding exists to bring enhanced access to the world’s best public university system,” Wilcox said.

Critics of the proposed hikes argue that the UC system dug itself into a hole by suspending member contributions into the UC pension fund for years and failing to enact reforms to the system’s defined-benefit plans until unfunded liabilities had swelled -- now totaling $7.2 billion.

This year, the UC system will pay an estimated $1.3 billion into the pension fund. UC Chief Financial Officer Nathan Brostrom told one newspaper that if the state would cover a third of that, tuition hikes wouldn’t be on the table now.

According to the California Department of Finance, the UC system’s general fund allocation was upped this year, and how to appropriate revenue is left to the board’s discretion.

The regents in September awarded pay raises to four chancellors, including Wilcox, who just completed his first year at the helm. His base pay went from $364,620 to $383,160.

The average UC system faculty pay is $116,000.

Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, an ex-officio regent, has opposed raising tuition, suggesting that the chancellors’ pay hikes makes imposing higher fees on students publicly distasteful.

The university “cannot bestow pay raises on its top earners with one hand, while continually taking more from students and their families with the other and deflecting criticism by laying its solution at the door of taxpayers,” he said.

UC President Janet Napolitano noted that tuition rates have been frozen for three years. If the 5 percent increase is approved, it would bump tuition for the 2015-16 school year by $612, to $12,804. Out-of-state students would pay the same increased rate, plus the non-resident fee of $22,878, which would also increase by the same percentage, according to UC.

The 5 percent increase assumes the state will provide the university system with a promised 4 percent increase in funding. But UC officials say that increase still falls short, and doesn’t even cover the cost of inflation.

Napolitano has said she hopes the plan will offer some stability to students, and will offer gradual, predictable increases instead of possible large spikes in tuition -- eliminating “volatility” in the tuition-setting process.

She also hoped it will spur the state to boost its funding of the UC system.

--City News Service

--Image via UC Riverside