Going Up

We'll provide our own review of the Regents meetings in due course, as we always do. And we are preserving the recordings, as we always do. But here is CalMatters on the tuition plan adopted yesterday:

The University of California has renewed its policy of annual tuition hikes [yesterday] after the UC Board of Regents voted 13 to 3 to approve the measure, despite fierce opposition from undergraduates. Broadly, what undergraduates will expect to pay for tuition doesn’t change once they enroll. The model regents approved still allows the system to increase undergraduate tuition and systemwide fees by as much as 5% annually, depending on inflation, and locks in that rate for students enrolling that year for up to six years. Each cohort of incoming students pays the same tuition, but what they pay is more than the previous year’s cohort, and less than what the next cohort will pay. This means that current undergraduate students would see no change to their tuition. Graduate students, however, would continue to see annual increases because they’re not on the cohort model. The revised plan begins in 2026-27.

This “stability” plan is a way to ensure UC can collect more revenue to finance the ever-increasing costs of educating students that signals consistency and predictability to students and their families, UC officials contend. The approach is a departure from a boom-and-bust cycle at UC in which tuition stays flat for several years until recessions and state cutbacks prompt double-digit tuition spikes in consecutive years. That happened during the 2007 Great Recession. After six years, tuition had doubled.

...Regent Michael Cohen, who helped to secure more financial aid for UC students when the board voted to launch the cohort plan in 2021, said he supported the model today because tuition stays flat for individual students for up to six years after they see a tuition hike once. To him, that means students get an increasing discount, as tuition stays flat while inflation rises... But Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis* vehemently opposed the continuation of the tuition increases. She said these decisions should be reviewed at least annually, not left alone for years at a time... 

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*Note: Kounalakis is running for state treasurer in 2026.

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The original plan proposed today would have led to endless ongoing tuition increases. But students and some regents were critical of the cohort model continuing without end, so the board voted to revisit the model in seven years. Guided by UC Office of the President officials, the board also lowered from 45% to 40% the share of new tuition revenue that flows to undergraduate financial aid. When regents installed this tuition hike plan, the return-to-aid figure was 33%. Counterintuitively, this means that low- and moderate-income students got thousands more in financial aid to cover tuition and additional living costs under these tuition increases than they would have had the UC not increased tuition. On the other hand, higher-income students, those from families with incomes above $120,000, generally paid hundreds of dollars more for their cost of attendance because they get less financial aid, median data from UC show. UC projections show that those trends will continue through the end of the decade.

Still, some higher-income students receive UC grants from return-to-aid. For example, a quarter of students whose families make between $147,000 and $184,000 received a UC grant in 2023-24. Students receive financial aid based on a federal formula that takes into account household income, money in certain financial accounts and untaxed income, such as life insurance payouts and inheritances.

...The drop in return-to-aid is a way to route more funding to campuses that have been rocked by federal cutbacks tied up in legal battles and state support that is less than Gov. Gavin Newsom and the state Legislature had indicated the UC would receive in past years...

UC officials persuaded the regents to make other technical changes that increase the odds that tuition for the next cohort would rise more than it has so far, but tuition increases would still be capped at 5%. One allows UC to defer the financial impact if inflation exceeds 5%. In that case, the percent that is above 5% would be applied to a future year when the inflation rate is lower.  Had this plan been in place since 2022, tuition would have risen by 1.5% more than it did this year, UC finance staff said.

The UC Regents also agreed to include another one-percentage-point increase in cohort tuition that would be dedicated to building maintenance or another campus need. Still, tuition increases wouldn’t exceed 5%. The system regularly asks for hundreds of millions in money but often gets much less. The system is able to issue bonds for new construction, but the amount is limited...

Full story at https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2025/11/uc-tuition/.