The University of California Abandons an Ideal
The Regents of the University of California will soon be considering a governance change that’s as overdue as it is depressing — changing the formal title of students’ payments from “fees” to “tuition.”
For most of the history of the University UC was free or nearly so. The system was created in 1868, but as late as 1956 the student fee stood at less than $100 a year. The state was committed to the principle that, as the university’s 1960 Master Plan had put it, UC would always be “tuition free to all residents of the state,” with teaching expenses absorbed by the taxpayer and fees representing “charges to the students for services not directly related to instruction, such as health, counseling … placement services, housing, recreation, and the like.”
Fees rose to $600 a year by the mid-seventies, and spiked again in the early eighties, but the increases were modest compared to what would come later. The 1956 fee had amounted to $656 in today’s dollars, while the the 1990 fee was worth $2362 in present-day money.)
