CSU, UC students to pay higher fees

The San Francisco Chronicle reports:

California's 626,000 public university students got clobbered Wednesday with their fifth tuition hike in six years as the governing boards of both the University of California and the California State University agreed to raise the price of attendance dramatically.

Despite emotional pleas from students, the UC Board of Regents and the CSU Board of Trustees said they had no choice but to increase the costs next fall to maintain the quality of the institutions.

As dozens of students chanted in protest outside, the regents voted 13-6 during their meeting at UCLA to increase undergraduate and graduate fees in the fall by 7 percent and professional school fees by up to 12 percent. Meanwhile, in Long Beach, the CSU trustees voted 15-1 to impose a 10 percent fee hike on undergraduate and graduate students next fall.

Regents acknowledged this is probably not the end of annual increases for UC students. Since the 2002 school year, undergraduate tuition has climbed 70.8 percent at UC's campuses and 72 percent at CSU's schools.

One UCLA student, 19-year-old Sarah Andrews, seemed to sum up the students' disappointment: "They are trying to tell me that they do not value ... students who come from low-income families, students of color and students who are not blessed enough to have parents to pay for a $23,000 education, students who work two to three jobs to get by, students who commute and take the bus to avoid high living costs."

The fees are rising as both institutions are under fire for their compensation of executives, among other things.

UC Regent Odessa Johnson, who voted against the fee hike, said she is bothered by the disconnect.

"When I'm asked to vote on increases for administrative salaries, and you come around and ask me to vote for a 7 percent increase today and next year and the year after, I want to say, sometime we have to stop the bleeding," Johnson said.

Don't they care about the children? If Exxon was raising prices every year for 25 years,Henry Waxman and gang would call for price controls.But,the big education lobby is a lot more powerful than the oil industry.It appears through subsidies and lobbying they've really shakedown the taxpayers.