Second thoughts at the legislature

The governor will soon be presenting his May Revise budget proposal. From the perspective of the legislature, despite all the PR that UC gives its research agenda, the typical legislator hears from parents whose kids didn't get into the UC of their choice. The fact that what gives prestige to the campuses that are disappointing parents is research doesn't register. 

Back in the Good Old Days, people are told - maybe by grandparents - it was easy to get into, say, UCLA. Now it is hard. It is also true, however, that the population of California has grown by a factor of around 2.5 since 1960, the date of the Master Plan. And more kids finish high school and want to go to college now. 

It is also true that the state has a lot more on its plate than it did in the early 1960s. Example: The state didn't worry about funding Medi-Cal back then because there was no Medi-Cal. So, despite the Master Plan's promise of no tuition, i.e., full state funding, UC gets a mix of tuition and funding. It gets a lot more money from out-of-state and international students than it does from in-state enrollees. 

To make room for more in-state students at the prestige campuses, the state required fewer out-of-state admissions and promised to reimburse UC for the loss or revenue. But that turns out to be expensive. So now the legislature is having second thoughts about the deal. From CalMatters:

In 2022, faced with mounting criticism from California parents and students who couldn’t get into the state’s three premier public universities, legislators and UC officials struck a deal. UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Diego would admit a combined 900 more in-state students a year, and the state would up their budgets to cover the loss of revenue from non-resident students, who pay three times what in-state students pay. 

That deal has since cost taxpayers $276 million and allowed around 3,000 more students to enroll at the three universities. While the costs were expected, the number is far higher than the annual $31 million figure Gov. Gavin Newsom and state legislators routinely cite for funding the in-state student expansion, a CalMatters analysis shows. Now, with one year to go in the five-year plan, some are wondering whether the program’s high costs should continue as-is, particularly as California faces several years of multibillion-dollar deficits...

Full story at https://calmatters.org/education/higher-education/2026/04/uc-admission/. (Dan Hare was nice enough to forward this article to yours truly.)

The fact is that you can always say that the marginal cost of adding one more kid in the back of the lecture hall is essentially zero. But that doesn't mean that adding thousands more will cost zero. And from UC's perspective, even if it were zero, those seats in the lecture hall could go to out-of-state students who pay more than in-state students. Since there are many in-state kids turned away, and many out-of-state kids turned away, the opportunity cost for UC of a seat is the difference between what the two kinds of students pay.

It has always been the case that you could "process" lots more undergraduate students cheaply. That's what CSU does. That's what the community colleges do. And that's why - as we have said on this blog umpteen times - the state needs a new Master Plan in which all the trade-offs are thrashed out rather ad hoc legislative directives.