"Memo to marching students: The governor can't save you. You guys need a new legislature. This one is selling you out. Organize an opposition and vote them out in November. Plan B is quit school and become a state billboard inspector."
Hundreds of University of California students rallied against a 32% tuition hike last week. Let's hope their future employers get a better work product. With just a little research, the students could have discovered that compensation packages won from the state by unions were a big reason for the hike.
Last year, the state cut funding to the 10-campus system to $2.6 billion from $3.25 billion. To make up for the reduction in state funding, the UC Board of Regents increased tuition to $10,300, about triple 1999's cost.
Understandably, students have gone wild. The UC system is supposed to offer low- and middle-income students a cheaper alternative to a private college education. Now a year at a UC school can cost students as much as at many private schools.
Who's to blame? UC President Mark Yudof rightly notes he had no other means of closing the university's budget gap. The university used $300 million in reserves last year and cut staff salaries by furloughing them between 11 and 26 days this year. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says "we've done everything we could, but the bottom line is it's not enough. We need to put pressure on the legislature not only this year in a year of crisis, but in the future."
The California legislature? Good luck with that. In 1999, the Democratic legislature ran a reckless gamble that makes Wall Street's bankers look cautious. At the top of a bull market, they assumed their investment returns would grow at a 8.25% rate in perpetuity—equivalent to assuming that the Dow would reach 25,000 by 2009—and enacted a huge pension boon for public-safety and industrial unions.
The bill refigured the compensation formula for pension benefits of all public-safety employees who retired on or after January 1, 2000. It let firefighters retire at age 50 and receive 3% of their final year's compensation times the number of years they worked. If a firefighter started working