UC proposes its first enrollment cap on out-of-state students
latimes.com
latimes.com
1) the cap is currently not limiting for the system as a whole, as the proportion is around 16%
2) It also includes a per-campus 20% cap, with raised caps for campuses that are already above 20%. So Berkeley, UCLA, and UCSD will be prevented from raising their nonresident proportions, and new growth will be redirected to schools like Merced (only 1% nonresident students).
My personal observation: no evidence is presented that nonresident admissions reduce the absolute number of Californians the system can support.
They pay much more in tuition than the UC spends on their education, and much of the remainder gets spent on in-state residents.
In-state admissions have fallen at highly competitive schools like UCLA not because out-of-state students are taking up more of a set number of spots, but because the amount of in-state students whose educations the UC can afford to subsidize has fallen because of decreasing state funding per student.
Declining admit rates of in-state students is a problem, but out-of-state students are part of the solution. I really, really hope this proposal doesn't get passed.
It's very hard for Berkeley and UCLA to stay competitive with Stanford and Caltech (and the Ivy League) when their private counterparts not only offer better financial aid for at-need low-income students, but are also starting to be in the same ballpark for in-state middle-class students. Not only that, but the main idea behind the UC system is that it was intended for California students first.
UCLA had over 100,000 applications last year, the most out of any other school, public or private. I am completely okay with declining out-of-state students in favor of comparable California students. It's just that to afford that, the UC system needs more money. Heck, I even think price gouging out-of-state applicants could work.
From the article I gathered that's exactly what they're doing right now, and it's working great. But the optics are bad for politics so they have to ruin it.
UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein said the proposed policy balanced the needs of California students with the benefits those outside students bring — diverse perspectives as well as millions in additional tuition revenue, which added up to nearly $550 million in 2016-17. Those dollars have helped UC increase its enrollment of California students to historical highs this year, Klein said, even as state support per UC student has fallen to less than half of what it was two decades ago.
Klein said the extra dollars from nonresidents — who pay about $27,000 more in annual tuition than Californians — have helped campuses recruit and retain faculty, add courses to lower overall class sizes, and purchase library materials, instructional equipment and technology. The nonresident revenue also has boosted financial aid for Californians by an average $700 per student, she said.
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block said the nonresident dollars provided a lifeline for the campus after state support for undergraduate education dropped significantly after the 2008 recession. Thanks to the extra money, UCLA was able to add courses, which has helped students shorten the time needed to graduate to less than four years.
It does literally the opposite. Out of state people are a net money gain, not a net money loss.
The more out of state people you can, the more instate people you can afford to accept.
Except that classes are overcrowded, understaffed, and underfunded[1]. There might be a balance, but we're not there yet.. and what we're doing isn't working.
[1] https://theaggie.org/2016/10/12/ucs-overcrowded-and-underfun...
At UCLA, triple occupancy rooms now account for 73 percent of all student housing, and the Westwood campus is quickly running out of room for expansion. Because of the lack of student housing at UC Berkeley, some students are being housed at Mills College in Oakland — a 25-minute shuttle ride away.
There may be a limit to how fast new capacity can be brought online, even with an increased budget; in that case, the increase needs to be a) slowed down to match the rate of investment, and b) distributed to the new campuses where new capacity is being added. This last is actually a result of the new policy, though I'm worried that these caps would remain even after capacity has caught up.
How does this screw California taxpayers?
Is UCLA over capacity?
Not just UCLA. So is Berkeley and to a lesser extent UCSD and UCI.
Few years later, UC might find it is hard to attract enough out-states students. so I do not think the limit matters.
The same thing was happening at my state school when I was there. Out of state students seem like a bad solution. Are we going to end up in a system where everyone has to go "out of state" because their in state school is under funded? It is like a perverse instantiation of musical chairs, and it seems broken.
I don't get this. Not only can a person who has pauper parents afford tuition + cash left over to pay the rent at any state school in the nation due to Pell Grants and subsidized student loans, but in California you still get additional state grants on top of that. Not to mention all the other freebies that California dumps on its residents.
If you mean to say that kids aren't going to college because they can't afford it, I don't buy it for one second. That is unless the student's parents have a job that gives a middle class income, disqualifying the student from getting a Pell Grant, and not contributing towards the education costs. Is that what you're referring to?
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/paying-for-uc/tu...
>$9,500 for freshmen, $12,500 for seniors
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/loans/subsidized-unsubsid... (subsidized here means super-subsidized, unsubsidized means less subsidized, as the government is still artificially restricting prices by guaranteeing the loan)
>for 2016-2017, Cal Grants are up to $12,240 at a University of California campus
Please correct me if the award isn't this high, I don't know anything about California grants.
http://www.csac.ca.gov/doc.asp?id=905
>Pell Grant: For the 2016–17 award year (July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017), the maximum award is $5,815
https://studentaid.ed.gov/sa/types/grants-scholarships/pell
Total .govbux: $27,555 Total tuition: $13,500
Twice as high lol
Why not simply follows Texas' Top 10% Rule[1] ?
> The law guarantees Texas students who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school class automatic admission to all state-funded universities
This top 10% rule, (in conjunction with a minimum SAT to avoid bad schools) would solve that mom problem (assuming the child is above the 90th percentile for that particular school).
there is a similar heuristic in place, but of course, the top 3 UC's is the same for everyone (berkeley, LA, SD)
http://admission.universityofcalifornia.edu/freshman/califor...
University of Washington, the state's top school, is now 1/3 non-state residents. It's a serious problem.
Out of state students pay about $50k/yr to attend a UC. In-state students pay about $12K, and the UC spends a bit over $30k per student. That means that each out-of-state student provides enough revenue to pay for an additional in-state student!
Absent additional state funding (lol), an enrollment cap would necessarily result in tuition increases. I really really hope it doesn't get passed.
http://www.dailycal.org/2016/06/29/campus-spends-1-million-c...
The fence... not sure if that was a judicious use of UC money.
Or, how about the UC system reduces spending per student?
Of course, waste should still be cut if it exists. Are there any specific programs that you think should have their funding reduced?
-Cuts in administration size and salaries.
-Cuts in facility expenditures; figure out a way to do more with less.
-An increase in the number of full time faculty.
-An increase in faculty and graduate instructor compensation.
I don't know why the "lol" is there, as the enrollment cap is a condition of additional state funding.
So we're talking a 40m/yr deficit from just 3 schools. If they were serious about funding these schools they would have done these numbers and given them a commensurate funding, but they didn't.
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/education/article/UC-regents-expect-to...
State funding can prevent the ratio from getting too far out of whack. Which is exactly what UC is doing.
The real problem is probably exploding tuition rates. But that's another conversation entirely...
Is it that clear that they do? For out-of-state students who leave after graduating, in-state students gained a broader network contact. For those who settle in California, the economy and tax base just grew.
So yeah. There's absolutely a conflict of interests. I'm surprised this is an unpopular opinion on HN. I expected lots of upvotes. It's a well known and widely discussed issue up here in Seattle.
There is a difference between less-qualified and under-qualified. The difference between a 3.7 and 3.8 high school GPA is negligible. Top state schools are so competitive that we're splitting hairs.
Thats not true. This number is not static.
Accepting more out of staters INCREASES the total number of slots for in-staters. Because now the university has more money to increase its total size.
Out of staters are a net money gain.
Isn't this blackmail? Or am I missing something?
The state doesn't want to own up to the fact that UC is so underfunded that its struggling to fulfill its purpose of educating Californians. To get more money, UC turns to admitting more students who can pay full price. So the solution by lawmakers is to solve the symptom (too few students from California) rather than the problem (not enough money to support lots of in-state students).You can bet that when UC pushes back against being squeezed even more by the state, the state will use it as an excuse to cut funding more.
The UC system also has an absurdly high ratio of administrative staff to academic staff, and administrative staff to undergraduates. It has become something of a jobs program for the state of California, and is the third-largest employer of a state that is the 6th-largest economy in the world.
Something has to give.
Research focussed universities like UC do of course spend a lot more on research, but those activities have their own dedicated funding streams, mostly Federal grants.
Their annual budget is pushing $30B, and their student population–expensive post-graduates included–clocks in at around a quarter million.
Those numbers have changed from year to year, but last I checked, their total expenditures came out to around $120K/student. Texas A&M by comparison is around $90K/student, with Harvard pushing $200K (their tuition is 5x what the UC system's is, for comparison).
Does the $30B per year not cover the funding for the UC medical centers, museums, athletic programs, etc.? The amount of money actually spent on students (through faculty salaries, financial aid, lab equipment, etc) is closer to $7B. Also you need to remove grad students from the calculation entirely, they disproportionately affect the numbers and they don't have out of state cap. Once you take all those factors into account you get ~$20k.
If I ran a training business with a negative P&L and couldn't fully fund my employee's pensions, I would hardly be able to say, "your calculations are oversimplified. Our losses include our museum and lacrosse team."
Also, the Board of Regents consists almost entirely of 7 government officials and 18 gubernatorial appointees (the exceptions being two members representing alumni, a faculty member, a student member, and the current or acting President of the University.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-26/ucla-wins...
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
A lot of political funding works this way. The drinking age in the US was set to 21 by the Federal government mandating that no state with an age lower than that would get their slice of highway funding.
Blackmail is demanding money, etc., under the threat of revealing saving information.
Offering money in exchange for doing something that the offering party wants isn't blackmail, or even anything similar.
Aren't they being political by accepting out of state students who pay more money? Are they looking at applicants bank accounts or are they looking for applicants that would be successful and contribute to the diversity of the school?
UC makes the claim that they out-of-state funding creates more spots for in-state applicants, while the audit says otherwise.
Both are plausible explanations, but we need some actual numbers in order to determine whether having a bias toward accepting more out-of-state applicants really does increase in-state applicant admissions.
Cf. what the audit actually found:
>The audit found that out-of-state applicants benefited from lowered admission standards [italics mine], while California students increasingly were turned away from their campus of choice.
The only reason to give out-of-state students lower admission standards than in-state students is if you're not merely admitting them but preferring them, and the obvious motive in preferring out-of-state students is that they pay five times as much if not more in tuition compared to in-state students.
One way to evaluate proposed solutions to problems is "can the proposed solution solve the problem?"; if the out-of-state enrollment in 2006 was 5.5% and in 2016 was 15% and the cap is 20% (these are the real numbers) then obviously the proposed solution cannot solve the problem and it is frankly questionable whether it is even a legitimate attempt to solve the problem. It appears to instead be a way to politically grandstand by scapegoating the UC admissions departments and the out-of-state students instead of admitting there's a funding problem. The $18M in funding is also a pittance:
>UC spokeswoman Dianne Klein said the proposed policy balanced the needs of California students with the benefits that nonresident students bring — diverse perspectives as well as millions in additional tuition revenue, which added up to nearly $550 million in 2016-17.
Increasing the proportion of out-of-state students by 1% here appears to bring in about $50 million. There is not even a clear financial incentive for the UC system to bother following this directive! They would make more money by ignoring it.
The financial data indicates that the UC system will likely ignore this directive. Considering that the State used a tiny carrot instead of a big stick, they probably know this. If the State were serious in addressing this problem they could threaten to fine the UC system for discriminating against local students as was found in the audit. However this would kill the "golden goose" and result in drastic underfunding of the system because out-of-state students are currently covering a budget gap way bigger than this proposal could ever address.
So the legislature is not going to do that. They made this proposal to rile up gullible Californian nativists who think outsiders are the source of all their problems, and you fell for it.
You are pretending that this was a no-brainer certain investment, this is an investment that produced significant gains, but the fact is that there should not exist any no-loss m, positive investments that make money without having some rebounding consequence anywhere else, otherwise this would have already been an investment taken, and because of the "No easy money clause" (E. Thorpe) related to investments and the literature on interest rates(LITERALLY the return on capital) we know that this is false.
You are trying to cite empirical evidence to lend warrant toward the thesis that this little out of state admissions thing was a very good thing with no downside, but as far as I know there are many no-go theorems or prohibition statements on that actually. As if there was that much free money and free wealth to be created from one decision that was an effective positive creation of wealth without any subtractive element on it!
There is simply no way that this decision was just sitting for us to take that provided this much of a net benefit, far above the rate of market returns. As if we are supposed to dignify a statement that acts like that space something operating in real time and space cannot be taken up and filled by the admission of out of state students and that this could not be filled up....... i'm sure your local taco stand doesn't fill up with the late-nite party bus of whomever out of towners comes to order food. We're all able to order right away baby, man, this is great.