Permanent budget crisis.

There are some newspaper stories that must be pretty easy to write at this point because it seems like they’re essentially the same year in and year out. California is having another budget crisis, and the Californians who are going to take it in the teeth are students — especially students in the California State University (CSU) system, to which the university that employs me belongs.

Once again, budget shortfalls at the state level mean enrollments will be capped at the 23 campuses in the CSU system. Practically, this means 10,000 or so qualified applicants will be turned away. In theory, they could bide their time in community colleges, except that the community college system is also getting slammed by the state budget. Or perhaps they could bide their time in the workforce, if there were actually jobs available.
That’s one of the cruel ironies: when the economy tanks, people come to the universities to get degrees that they think may help them reposition themselves and find a better job. (In some instances, “better” means “one that still exists”.) But the bad economy creates a budget shortfall which means that the CSU doesn’t have as many slots in which people can get educated while waiting out the bad economy.
And this happens with frightening regularity.
It wasn’t too long after I first moved to California (in the fall of 1989) that a recession hit. I’m told that the early ’90s marked truly frightening budget cuts from which the CSU never fully recovered, despite the fact that the California economy had a few booms (and busts) since then.
Which means that, besides the enrollment caps, the larger class sizes and the greater reliance on lecturers is something we’re pretty used to by now.
(Let the record reflect that the lecturers I know best are highly qualified — with Ph.D.s and publication records — and excellent, committed teachers. But they have heavy teaching loads, unwieldy amounts of grading, and, given the crap pay, they often have to pick up sections at multiple institutions to piece together something resembling a living wage. The crap pay, and the fact that many lecturers are not officially working “full time” at any of the institutions for which they work and thus don’t get full time benefits, is where the savings come in for the universities.)
Of course, while resources in the classroom get tighter, administrators are still getting raises. I’m sure, for the good of the system, they’re each picking up a section or two of teaching, or taking home essays to grade. Right?
What’s crazy about this is not just that we’ve been here before — that the CSU is always the first thing to get slammed by a state budget shortfall and the last thing to recover. The crazy thing is that this is a response bound to make things — including the California economy — worse for everyone. It’s put really well in an editorial in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:

The cumulative impact of these changes is a simple one: CSU can no longer meet its commitment to offer places to all eligible students. The educational mission of the CSU system has historically been a democratic one – to educate the majority of the California workforce; to keep its doors open to as many qualified students from as many backgrounds as possible. But the state’s perennial inability to manage its budget is eroding that mission. And as CSU finds itself less and less able to educate the majority of the California workforce, the students won’t be the only ones to suffer.

In other words, balancing the budget on the backs of the students is dumb. So maybe this time we ought to leave the CSU with the resources needed to educate the folks lining up for an education and find someplace else to tighten our belts.