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Saturday, April 4, 2015

Coming Wednesday

From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

...State Sen. Marty Block, D-San Diego, has proposed a bill that would reward students $4,000 for graduating on time, expand grants, increase course offerings and hold off proposed tuition increases at the University of California. The $350 million price tag of his bill would be paid by the state general fund, nonresident tuition increases and scholarship funds...

Block’s proposal, Senate Bill 15, is scheduled to be heard by the Senate Education Committee on Wednesday. Block, a member of that committee and chair of a budget subcommittee overseeing education financing, said the bill is an alternative to tuition hikes proposed by the University of California... The bill would provide $150 million to the UC and CSU systems to expand support services that help students graduate in time. Of that money, $25 million would go to each system to increase the number of certain courses that are in high demand and often full, causing students to delay their graduations. Another $113 million would be used to fund enrollment growth at the UC and CSU systems... 

The introduction of the bill was timed so it would be named SB15 as a reminder for students to take 15 units each semester to graduate on time... The bill is contingent on the UC Regents backing off a proposal to increase tuition by 5 percent each year for five years...


When you look at the bill itself as opposed to the newspaper write-up, none of the allocations of funds appear, so presumably the estimates come from staff. Here is the actual funding text from the bill: http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billAnalysisClient.xhtml:

SEC. 5. It is the intent of the Legislature to do both of the following to support higher education in California for the 2015–16 fiscal year:

(a) Appropriate funds to the Regents of the University of California for the 2015–16 fiscal year to eliminate the 5 percent tuition increase adopted by the regents in November 2014.
(b) Appropriate funding to the University of California and the California State University to do both of the following:
(1) Provide additional course offerings for students to complete a bachelor’s degree in four years or less.
(2) Provide support services to students to aid them in completing a bachelor’s degree in four years or less. 

How real is any of this? Or is the action essentially at the Committee of Two? The only other Martin Block known to yours truly was a disk jockey from the 1940s famous for a program called "Make Believe Ballroom." See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Block. Or listen:
 

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