The Daily Bruin is running a story about UCOP's "rebenching" plan designed to equalize the payment per undergraduate each campus receives. Rebenching is to be phased in over time. Ostensibly, nothing is being taken away. UCLA currently gets more than the average. So in the future it will get lower increments. Of course, that is a take-away.
So what will be the likely outcome? Despite the fact that the Regents and UCOP are officially against campus-set tuition differentials, differential tuition is what is more likely to happen under the plan. UCLA is likely to find ways of compensating for the take-away by charging more. Given its pool of applicants, it could charge more without adverse impacts. It will likely increase its out-of-state student enrollments, again, because it can.
No one in officialdom wants to acknowledge what is really happening. If you listened to the Regents' retreat posted earlier on this blog, you will hear that the official position of UCOP is that unequal tuition would not be a good idea right now - but later is left open. Anyway, this blog is under no constraint to pretend.
The Bruin article is at:
http://www.dailybruin.com/article/2012/09/ucla-may-lose-additional-state-funds-under-approved-rebenching-budgetary-model
While you are contemplating take-aways that supposedly don't take away and equalization that will lead to separation, you might like a little musical background:
5 comments:
Dan:
I don't think that your take gets things quite right. It is extremely unlikely that funding per student at UCLA will go down. Rebenching is designed to be funded by new additional money, and the notion is that a certain amount of that new money (when it appears) will be distributed to bring other campuses per student funding UP to the level of UCLA's. This process may mean that UCLA's funding would not increase as quickly as it would without rebenching but it is incorrect to equate a slower rate of growth with an actual cut. It is also the case that the rebenching process is part 2 of the shift in how funds are distributed to campuses. Part 1 was the so-called "funding streams" model and that was designed to favor campuses like UCLA that have access to greater revenues of various sorts. This benefit was made clear when UC decided not to socialize NRT as had been done at times in the past (I think up to 2007 actually). That is not to say that there aren't still issues to be worked out and some major questions about the whole process (funding streams and rebenching) to be worked out (I am hoping to get something up at Remaking the University about that). But insofar as people are claiming that rebenching will but funding per student at UCLA I would approach that with a great deal of skepticism.
You can't equalize a process which contains inequality without taking away from the beneficiary of the inequality, at least prospectively. If the inequality continued, UCLA would be the beneficiary. If it is taken away gradually, UCLA will gradually lose out. This is not complicated.
If one person is making 100,000 and another person is making 60,000 and you figure out a way to raise up the 60,000 to 100,000 so they both earn 100,000 how is that taking away from the person who started at 100,000? I agree it is not complicated.
For UCOP's explicit opposition to rebenching as equalization, see the discussion and links at http://utotherescue.blogspot.com/2012/01/racial-patterns-of-campus-budget.html
The current rebenching plan, as Michael correctly notes, comes entirely from new money.
This is another way of saying it is unlikely to happen in this decade.
Other UC campuses may welcome a situation in which the flagships, which includes Davis based on per-student income, were willing to replace state funds with non-state funds, so that their much higher than average state revenues no longer comes by diverting money that would normally have followed enrollments to the newer campuses
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