You know why I have mixed feelings?

thedisgruntledgradstudent:

Because a state education is still pretty cheap, wrt to a private education. It has to be paid for somehow. If people aren’t going to let the government raise taxes, a little bit, resulting in a huge gain then it’s going to have to come out of their pockets in lumps.

Seriously, someone did the math on funding for some huge project, on the order of hundreds of millions of dollars, and it amounted to pennies a year, for each person. COME ON.

Also, they had this debate in the SUNY system a few years back. As far as I can tell, most people survived the cost hike.

And it’s the state. They give much better financial aid.

Just because it’s public doesn’t mean it costs nothing.

If it were simply about cost, it would be somewhat easier to write this off, but it’s not. The university has also fired lecturers and staff; refused to give tens of thousands of unionized workers a contract; cut diversity funding and “ethnic” resource centers; cut classes and drastically increased class sizes; cut teaching assistantships and obliterated graduate funding beyond TAships (so grad students will rarely if ever have a quarter off to research unless they find outside funding); and that’s actually just the tip of the iceberg. At most campuses, the libraries, for which funding was never increased when there was a budget surplus, have faced cuts so drastic that they now remain closed for entire weekends. Entire departments—and usually the departments that focus on social justice and/or transformation (ethnic studies, community studies, feminist studies)—may not survive this round of cuts. They have certainly been the first to be threatened. In many cases by people from the same generation that paid $19 per class when they attended UC.

While this all has been happening, the university has continued their long-term construction projects with little or no interruption: we don’t know why this is because, despite the fact that this is a public university, the budget is not transparent. It’s likely that the university has actually pledged these tuition hikes not to preserve the quality of education, but to preserve their bond ratings in order to continue their construction projects. It’s impossible to say this for sure, because, again, there is no budget transparency, but the writing appears more or less on the wall.

Additionally, a state education remains cheap because of the labor environment it takes shape in; not simply because of the tuition paid. Yeah, the university gives okay financial aid, but more and more, students depend on loans to cover the cost of tuition and living expenses. Every quarter, more and more students of mine are working full time to pay tuition. More and more of my students—particularly my students of color—are dropping out or at least considering it because the costs are prohibitive. As a TA, I make about 15K a year, with benefits, which is barely enough to cover my rent.

All these cuts, and these tuition hikes, seem to promise, as I see it, is that we’re all paying more for a considerably shittier education. Of course education costs something, but all these cuts do effectively, is to redistribute what should be a public burden—borne by all, and, yes, IMO, especially those who have benefited most from the society they live in (i.e. the rich)—to individual students and their families. That, to me, is the most bare-bones definition of privatization, and we seem to be living it out rather nightmarishly in the UC right now.