State Auditor Issues Critical Report on UC

The California State Auditor has just issued a very critical lengthy report on UC. Its main points are complaints about out-of-state enrollments and rising tuition for residents. You can get a sense of the tone of the report from the excerpts below:

The university admitted nearly 16,000 nonresidents from academic years 2012–13 through 2014–15 who were less academically qualified on every academic indicator we evaluated—grade point averages, SAT, and ACT scores—than the upper half of residents whom it admitted at the same campus. (p. 27)

The university’s emphasis on enrolling increasing numbers of nonresidents has hampered its efforts to enroll more underrepresented minorities because only 11 percent of enrolled nonresident domestic undergraduates were from underrepresented minorities. (p. 37)

Over the past 10 years, the university has repeatedly increased the cost of tuition without sufficient justification and to the detriment of California families. (p. 41)

The university should develop a reasonable, well-supported methodology and use it as the basis for funding requests and tuition increases. (p. 43)

(E)ven though the university asserts that enrolling more nonresidents has not precluded it from meeting its Master Plan commitment to select from the highest achieving students in the State—the top 12.5 percent of all California high school graduates—the university’s admission decisions call into question whether it has actually met this commitment. (p. 45)

Requiring the university to enroll significantly more resident undergraduate students would require an additional financial commitment from both the university and the State. (p. 45)

Because the university’s home loan program [for faculty and administrators] is financially dependent on the university, it ties up a substantial amount of funding—more then $252 million—in a long-term investment that the university could use elsewhere. (p. 51)

The University Provides Salaries and Benefits That Significantly Exceed the Compensation of Other High-Level State Positions. (p. 52)

Although the Office of the President collects high-level financial information that it uses to detect spending anomalies, it does not know with any specificity how campuses use state funds. (p. 71)

After three years of rebenching, the two campuses with the highest per-student state funding are Berkeley and Los Angeles, which also enroll the most nonresident students and have some of the lowest percentages of underrepresented students. (p. 83)

The report is at https://www.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2015-107.pdf

It should be noted, however, that the item in boldface above involves commitment from the state as well as the university. Exactly how that state commitment is to be obtained is not described.