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Monday, November 24, 2014

Listen to the afternoon Regents meeting of Nov. 19, 2014

We continue to upload and archive the recent Regents meeting.  Since we have reported and provided an excerpt of the morning meeting of Nov. 19 at which the Regents approved their tuition/funding plan, we provide here the afternoon meeting.  It has the virtue of being shorter than the morning meeting and yours truly is traveling at the moment, making recording more difficult than usual.

The afternoon meeting actually had a continuation of the morning meeting in that there was a supplementary tuition/funding plan related to professional degrees.  Issues were raised about the resident vs. non-resident gap in total costs.  It was also noted that some professional fields, e.g., social work, do not result in high-paid careers.

It was argued by UC that going along with the governor’s budget plan would harm diversity and access goals.  However, the UC student assn. prez spoke against tuition increases and wanted student input into the governor’s proposed joint commission (if there is one). 
 
The Committee on Finance approved the proposed operating budget plan for 2015-16.  There was note taken of the Legislative Analyst’s report indicating that there was more state revenue coming in than originally forecast.  As per our previous post, when it was asserted by the lieutenant governor that UC had broken a deal with the governor on a tuition freeze, VP Patrick Lenz refuted the notion that there ever was a written compact.  Efforts to come to a written deal did not produce one.

UCLA Chancellor Block noted that there were limits to how high out-of-state tuition could be due to issues of competitiveness with other institutions.  Finally, various financial reports were received, including a valuation of the UC pension.  On an “actuarial” (moving average) basis, the plan was 79% funded as of last July 1.  On a market basis – thanks to good performance of financial markets – the ratio was 87%.  Retiree health is not pre-funded and essentially is zero percent funded.

You can hear this session at the link below:

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