Increased admission fees likely for some local colleges

If the state heeds one recommendation, students who attend San Joaquin Delta College in Stockton could be paying more for their classes as soon as January.

Fee increases for junior colleges and state universities are among the recommendations in helping close a multi-billion-dollar deficit in California's budget. Since University of the Pacific is a private institution and is not funded by the state, it is not directly affected by the budget cuts and is not currently proposing any hikes.

Mac Taylor, the state's new legislative analyst and non-partisan adviser to the government, said last week that lawmakers might want to consider increasing community college fees from $20 per unit to $26 per unit on Jan. 1 and $30 on July 1.

However, such an increase has not yet been approved.

"As a college, we keep our focus on what is good for students. Fee increases hinder access to education, and that is never a good thing," said Delta College spokesman Greg Greenwood.

"Also, the state of our local economy combined with the economic status of our student population means that any fee increase would likely affect our students disproportionately; also not a good thing," he added.

The University of California was planning a 9.4 percent fee hike for most in-state student fees at its 10 campuses, but decided late Thursday to not increase tuition. For the current school year, the state reduced its operating support for the UC system by $48 million, and Gov. Schwarzenegger has proposed another $65.5 million in mid-year cuts. In addition, UC must achieve $100 million in savings in 2008-09 to cover student enrollment growth and inflationary increases in fixed costs that the state budget did not fund.

The 23-campus California State University system, too, recently said it would seek enough state funding to avoid a 10 percent student fee increase for the 2009-10 school year, as was necessary this school year.

Instead, any further budget reductions will likely result in increased class sizes, fewer course sections, additional temporary instructors and the scaling back of other services, according to a press release issued by the system.

The closest CSU campuses are Sacramento and Stanislaus.

The proposed mid-year cut outlined by the governor last week would come on top of the final 2008-09 budget, which was $215 million below CSU's operational needs for the fiscal year, and in addition to a previous one-time $31.3 million reduction.

The CSU system receives a total of $2.97 billion from the state General Fund and $1.5 billion from student fee revenue.

Contact reporter Jennifer Bonnett at jenniferb@lodinews.com.

Reader Feedback

educator wrote on Nov 23, 2008 6:39 PM:

" Why not let the ASGB help pay student fees. They take and take, but give nothing back to the students outside their inner circle. "

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