Fall of the UC System?

From Prof. Wendy Brown's article "When The Public University Can No Longer Afford Itself: The Impending Crisis in UC Graduate Programs." From here.

"Here are some rough numbers that make the point. In the 2000-01, when in-state tuition/fees were about $3400 and non-resident tuition/fees were $13,700, and when competitive fellowships were a bit lower than they are now, supporting a grad student who was a California resident cost approximately 21K annually and supporting one from Chile cost about 32K (This is the combined cost of tuition plus a fellowship, or tuition plus a GSI-ship or GSR-ship.) Today, with in-state tuition/fees at 15K and out-of-state tuition/fees at 30K, it costs approximately 36K/year to support the Californian and 51K/year to support the Chilean. If the UCOP-planned tuition increases occur over the next four years, in 2016-17, the cost would be over 42K/year for the California resident and over 55K (possibly as high as 60K) for the non-resident.

Thus, in 2000-01, for an entering graduate student cohort of fifteen, the cost of supporting a class of thirteen non-residents and two California residents for a year was approximately 458K. Today, that cohort costs approximately 735K and in 2016-17 it would be approximately 900K, almost twice what it was at the beginning of the century. On the other side of the ledger, allocations for graduate programs are shrinking, not growing. Indeed, part of the way that UC is managing budget cuts is by cutting funding to graduate programs.

The increase in graduate student cost and decrease in allocations for graduate student funding means that departments are now looking at admitting and enrolling cohorts of less than half the size of a decade ago. Moreover, they can no longer afford non-U.S. students (who never become eligible for in-state tuition rates) and are eyeing affirmative action for Californians (who cost significantly less in their first year). The elimination of international students and growing preference for Californians presents the wonderful irony of departments trying to end-run the revenue-generating strategies of their own institution. (Neoliberal entrepreneurial strategies produce great numbers of such ironies.) But it also represents another serious blow to UC graduate programs on top of shrinking cohort size. While UC’s undergraduate mission should be aimed at Californians, strong Ph.D programs must attract and enroll the best students in the world–that is what secures their excellence and renown. But the opposite is happening in each case: UC seeks to enrich its coffers by decreasing the proportion of Californians in its undergraduate population while graduate programs aim to cheapen costs by favoring Californians and eliminating foreign students.

The effects of the crisis for graduate programs resulting from tuition increases are just beginning to be felt but departments are panicking as they take them in. Smaller and weaker graduate student cohorts will have multiple ramifications: Faculty will have fewer graduate students to mentor, do less graduate teaching and work with less talented students with lower placement prospects. This will drive away the best UC faculty and make it difficult to recruit the best new faculty talent. Together these effects will lead to drops in department rankings which will further dampen interest in UC by superlative faculty and applicants to Ph.D programs. At this point you can see the whole downward spiral–there goes the quality that UCOP and the UC Senate were trying to preserve. Undergraduate education too, will be effected by declining quantity and quality of graduate student instruction, which will surely lead some excellent would-be UC undergraduates to go elsewhere for their education.

Of course, some might argue that the shrinking market for Ph.Ds warrants a compression of graduate programs. But the demand for Ph.Ds is probably changing more than it is shrinking. Certainly faculty research positions in the letters and science will constrict, but massive numbers of Ph.Ds will be needed to staff the on-line and other factory-style undergraduate courses looming on the horizon. The soon-to-be lower-ranked UC graduate programs would be just the right source for such workers."