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Comment by smaili | Hacker News Reader

> The proposed limit on students from other states and countries — which would be the first ever for the 10-campus public research university — comes after a scathing state audit last year found that UC was hurting California students by admitting too many out-of-state applicants. UC President Janet Napolitano has blasted those findings as unfair and unwarranted, but state lawmakers are requiring that UC adopt a policy restricting nonresident students in order to get an additional $18.5 million in funding this year.

Isn't this blackmail? Or am I missing something?

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The state is able to make funding contingent.

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 spends $120K/year per student, roughly 10x the tuition and fees a California resident will pay to attend.

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.

I don't know where your $120K/year per student figure comes from, but it seems highly misleading. The most recent figures I could find (AY 2012-2013) put the cost at $16,890. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-educational-e...

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.

That core fund report seems to be missing something, as if the total total per-student cost were $16,890, the vast majority of that would be covered by the current $12.3K annual tuition (to say nothing of +$27K from out-of-state students). The UC system would therefore be unlikely to have the underfunded pension problem they currently face, for example.

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).

Your calculations are oversimplified. The real cost to a student should be around $20k.

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.

I'm not sure why those areas can be selectively dismissed. That the UC system overextends itself in a variety of non-instructional areas isn't a compelling case for its fiscal health and management acumen.

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."

These figures show that research intensity varies significantly between Texas A&M, UC, and Harvard. Number of students is not a terribly useful denominator when most of a university's income and expenditure is for research.

No, it's not blackmail. Funding contingent on policy changes is a norm, not just in the California but in the US and, I'm going to go out on a limb, across all western democracies. State legislators presumably have the power to compel policy changes in the UC system, so conditional funding isn't really even them playing hardball.

Actually that's not true in California. The UC system is constitutionally independent from the state, and answers only to the Board of Regents. They could go full private and the California government couldn't do anything about it beyond withdrawing funding.

That's not quite right; the University is a public trust defined in the California Constitution, which defines the role of the Board of Regents and limits legislative control over the board. The Regents could not go "full private" as that would violate the Constitution.

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.)

I think you may have mixed up blackmail and extortion. Blackmail is demanding money in return for not revealing someone's secrets. Extortion is obtaining something through force or threats.

They aren't entitled to state funds if they ignore the state's wishes. If they want full autonomy they need to go private.

I don't believe "going private" is an option for any of the UC schools.

So I guess that means they have to follow the wishes of their funding source.

It's a little bit more complicated than "they're government employees", but not much more.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...

Not completely accurate. UCLA Anderson "went private" a few years ago, though that appears to only mean that it doesn't rely on state funding for operations - it's still a public institution.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-06-26/ucla-wins...

UC is a public institution. It's arm-twisting, but a far cry from the crime of demanding compensation in exchange for not revealing damaging information. And arguably, it's an exchange; implementing the policy may cost the University system some tuition dollars, and some amount of funding for this loss seems justified.

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.

> Isn't this blackmail? Or am I missing something?

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.

Given that UC needs the funding to stay operational or competitive: It is extortion.

It's an $18.5 million piece of the ~$30 billion UC budget; it's not even 0.1%. It's hardly as critical as you are trying to paint it.

It's a state school, so no.

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