These are our hardest working, highest achieving students and they will have to come up with 10,000+ next year and somehow find more money to pay for food, housing, healthcare and whatnot.
At best, a large chunk of them will be broke and the others saddled with miserable debt.
Now in addition to these protests, I'd like to see these students challenge their parents, their grandparents, their relatives, people they know at church and people even like us to stop fighting tax increases for necessary services.
This state is going down the tubes but it's not because of taxes, it's because we are simply doing less as a community to care for, to educate, and to train our people (if not to imprison them).
Something has got to give and our citizens reminding us what we are losing by avoiding tax increases at any cost (Schwarzenegger and the 35% Republican legislature's position). We've got to somehow make headway to either modify Prop. 13 in terms of property taxes. Commercial property taxes are based on 1978 levels if there hasn't been turnover). We also need to stop the tyranny of the minority by allowing budges and taxes to pass with 50% of the vote. Unilaterally assessing long held residential property at 1978 levels results in many people on my street of near $350-450k properties paying far less than $1000/year in property taxes. I wouldn't want to soak them, but on the other hand, can we run a society on $1000/year per household in an area this wealthy?
Just a few weeks ago, we had cities all over the Bay Area pass parcel taxes to fund their schools where the vote was 67% or greater. Places like Santa Clara supported these taxes by 63%, but Prop. 13 requires a 2/3 vote. So the measures didn't pass though they had vast support. In this universe, 63% saying yes are less important than 37% saying no. Worse still, where these measures "lost", the SF Chronicle reported the voters sent "mixed messages" on parcel taxes because in Fremont they only supported them by 58% and Santa Clara by 63%.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/11/19/BAGN1AND7E.DTL(11-19) 17:29 PST LOS ANGELES - -- The University of California regents voted Thursday to raise tuition by 32 percent as angry students pounded drums and blocked exits to the UCLA building where the regents were meeting.
"I absolutely had to vote for this," said Assembly Speaker and Regent Karen Bass after the vote. As an architect of the state's budget - which has contributed to a shortfall of more than $800 million over the last two years - "it would have been hypocritical of me not to."
The vote was 20-1, with only student Regent Jesse Bernal of UC Santa Barbara voting against the increase that will raise undergraduate tuition to $10,302 next fall, not counting living expenses. Students will see a midyear increase of 15 percent starting in January.
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Outside the meeting, about 2,000 students chanted loudly before the vote and long after the meeting was over. They beat drums and shouted "No justice! No peace!" and lay down en masse to symbolize what they called the death of an affordable UC education.
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Overall, the demonstrators kept the protest more peaceful than Wednesday's, when 14 people were arrested for disrupting that meeting three times and resisting arrest. Only two protesters were arrested Thursday, and the regents were interrupted only once by a group of angry speakers who police escorted outside.
The vote followed the recommendation the day before by the regents' finance committee. Once they were done, Yudof and the regents addressed a chief concern of the protesters, saying students simply didn't understand that most low-income students won't be affected by the fee increase.
"There will not be any students who won't be able to afford a UC education," Yudof told reporters. "If someone slips through the cracks, send me an e-mail and we'll take care of it."
He was referring to UC's Blue and Gold program in which the university will pick up the entire tuition, excluding living and campus costs, for students whose families earn $70,000 or less and who qualify for other financial aid such as Cal Grants and federal Pell Grants.
About 30 percent of UC students - 53,000 - are eligible for the free tuition, UC officials said.
"This is so little understood," Regent Eddie Island said during the meeting."We've got to do more to spread this message to students and their parents."
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He also pointed out that UC has lost more than $800 million in state funding since last year, leading the university to lay off some 2,000 employees, reduce faculty pay through furloughs and cut course offerings to students.
"There is no money," said Yudof, who has taken a 10 percent pay cut in the last year from his approximately $600,000 salary. :wtf:
One critic of the regents' action, Assemblyman Alberto Torrico (D-Fremont), said the decision to raise fees was "not only deeply unfortunate, it is unnecessary." He has been pushing a bill that would impose a tax on oil extracted in California, which would be directed toward higher education in California. Torrico estimates the tax would raise up to $1.3 billion for UC, the California State University system and community colleges.
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