The more, but not the merrier

An op ed recently appeared in the Sacramento Bee by Giuliana Perrone, associate professor of history at UC Santa Barbara: [excerpts]

The University of California has just admitted what it says is its “largest and most diverse” class of students ever. This sounds positive — more Californians are gaining access to higher education, especially first generation and low-income students as well as individuals from underrepresented backgrounds. But as a UC faculty member, I reacted with despair. Where will these students live? Who will teach them? Who will advise them? How will they get the classes they need? Who will support their physical and mental health?

...I am the proud product of the UC system and I am extraordinarily grateful to be a faculty member at one. I earned my PhD at Berkeley, and am now a professor at UC Santa Barbara. I know first-hand how transformative the UC can be in people’s lives, and I strongly believe in its core principles, articulated in the state’s 1960 master plan, to pursue excellence in research and teaching while making higher education accessible to all. That ethos remains strong among faculty, but it is not enough to sustain the system.

Year after year, the UC enrolls more students than ever before. This is on top of the enrollment “surges” of prior years... At UC Berkeley, for example, the faculty to student ratio rose from 18-1 to 30-1 between 1990 and 2020, and many students are taking longer to earn their degrees because they can’t get into the classes they need. As someone who regularly teaches large classes — sometimes over 500 students with long waitlists — it is impossible for me to provide students with the focused attention so many need to reach their full academic potential, let alone do so while also fulfilling research and administrative requirements.

Our facilities also show signs of decades of deferred maintenance... Similarly, housing shortages have plagued the system, and viable solutions to the problem have been slow to materialize... It would be easy to blame campus spending for the UC’s budgetary crisis, such as the new labor contract with graduate student employees. But these are red herrings that detract from the structural problems we face. It would have been far cheaper, for instance, to invest in the construction of student housing than it is now to pay our students a salary that keeps up with cost of living increases. In other words, demands for higher pay are a symptom of a crumbling system — not its cause.

...The UC was once considered the best university system in the world, and our master plan became the gold standard for higher education. But we’re a shell of our former selves, and that’s exactly what awaits the record number of new admits that will join the UC in the fall.

Full op ed at https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article291019795.html.