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.

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Posted in Academia, Current events, Personal, Politics, Social issues.

5 Comments

  1. Same crap is happening at my LRU. The state budget was cut 15%. All lecturers/softmoney folks are either getting axed or their salaries are getting 15% chopped.
    So, I get paid 8k to teach one 200 student class. That’s $8000 – 1200 = $6800 for me. (I’m lucky to have a job, right?). The budget gets back 1200 peanuts.
    Meanwhile, administrator dude making 150k isn’t giving himself a pay cut (of course… I mean, really?!?!?) or taking on extra classes (rofl). If his salary were to be cut 15% (by aliens), he would have to squeak by on a meesly 127k to save the school $22000.
    Therefore, I add:
    A) balancing the budget on the backs of the folks in charge making tons of cash is smart
    B) balancing the budget on the backs of the folks making less than 50k in the first place is dumb

  2. Unpopular sentiment alert:
    I teach in the CSU system. There are a lot of really weak students in my classes. If we tighten admissions standards, trim the students who were least likely to finish anyway, and devote more attention to the smaller group of students that we have, there might be a few silver linings here.

  3. Inserting snark: Why should the people at the top take a pay cut? After all, haven’t they paid their dues and earned their right to be there?
    *This comment has been fully loaded with a heavy dose of sarcasm.

  4. Hi Janet,
    I found your post a little confusing on one point. When you write “Once again, budget shortfalls at the state level mean enrollments will be capped” that implies that enrollments in the CSU system have been capped before. But all the news articles are claiming this is unprecendented in 48 years of CSU history. Can you please clarify — have enrollment caps happened before?
    Example mainstream news article:
    http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/11/20/BADS1483JN.DTL&hw=CSU&sn=001&sc=1000
    Thanks.

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