Median tax to restore higher education: $32
The UC regents are expected later this spring to remove the word "public" from the schools it examines when setting the price for attending professional school, opening the door to even faster tuition increases. This one-word change will move another step toward fully implementing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's vision, articulated in the 2004 "Compact on Higher Education," to privatize UC and CSU.
The governor has cut state support and overseen huge fee increases, shifting more of the cost of college onto students and their families.
The UC regents would be using tuition and fees charged by private universities, which serve far fewer students and were never designed to create opportunities for the people of California, as the basis for setting fees for UC professional schools. (The regents already implemented the proposed policy for the law school at Berkeley, which already costs more than Stanford's law school, $48,700 versus $42,400.) While the proposal coming to the regents is just for professional schools, the same arguments already have been made internally at the University of California to justify higher undergraduate tuition, too.
Facing public opposition, Schwarzenegger has done what every smart politician does: He has pretended to change. He decried the fact that California spends more on prisons than higher education and called for a constitutional amendment to commit at least 10 percent of the state budget to the University of California and California State University and limit prison funding to 7 percent.
Indeed, because he prepares the state budget, Schwarzenegger simply could have
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