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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

When I worked for Berkeley our bosses made it very clear: they can’t stop us from billing more than 39.5 hours in a week, but if we did, they’d have to let us go and stop offering the service we provide, because they just didn’t have the budget.

It’s not like we were providing essential services. We were doing things to make the other students’ lives better, and we were all fine with the restriction.

We were also learning a lot ourselves in the process, and valued the work experience far more than the few extra dollars.

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In 2018, UC Berkeley’s endowment was valued at $4.3 billion. It’s not too late to learn not to allow others to take advantage of you.

I worked there over 20 years ago. The work I did there prepared me for a very lucrative career and I wouldn’t trade it for anything, especially not a few more dollars.

Also, the endowment isn’t unlimited use. Most of it is earmarked for specific uses. When someone donates $500M to build a building, the money can only be used to maintain the building. When they endow a professorship, that money can only be used for that professors salary and research.

$4.3B is pretty small for a university the size of Berkeley.

Question: were you financially supported by your family during that time? "a few more dollars" seems diminutive, but according to the union, there are multiple people who are owed $20,000 or more.

No I paid for college myself with a combination of work and loans.

"I worked there over 20 years ago."

Enough said. Tuition today is a hair below $40,000 for an in-state student* compared to a hair below $5,000 in the mid 90's. They can afford every penny.

: https://admissions.berkeley.edu/cost

*: https://www.dailycal.org/2014/12/22/history-uc-tuition-since...

Might want to double check your sources. Tuition is $14,000 now compared to $5,000 when I was there. That’s roughly double when you account for inflation.

It’s not nothing, but it’s also not super relevant.

Also in that same period, the UC system has lost more than 1/2 its state funding, hence the increase.

The school doesn’t really have any more to work with now than it used to, but has a lot more students since they are required to accept the top 2% of all California students.

Room & board is practically mandatory and costs $17.5k. That cost cannot simply be ignored and was a fraction of that 20 years ago.

This is what your econ professor would call "comparing stocks and flows" and it's a pretty common theme in critiques of university endowments.

$4.3 billion could pay four-year in-state cost of attendance for 36,000 undergraduates. Enrollment is 31,000. Only one graduating class would make it through before the institution shut down.

The UC system endowment's return last year was 8.2% [0], or $344 million. Its budget was $3 billion. In other words, its wealth can only sustainably fund 10% of its operations, in a good year.

[0] https://www.ucop.edu/investment-office/_files/report/annual-...

The problem with this is it assumes that OP's direct bosses have access to their fair chunk of $4.3b, which I doubt.

The money stops flowing some place, but no one can ever seem to point where. Individual departments are always severely strapped, so not likely there. Could be the university admins are just holding it in coffers and the individual departments only get small incremental increases relative to class sizes.

As a UC school, is it possible to get access to the books?

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