La Jolla Would Like to Leave UC-SD Behind

The folks in La Jolla - or some of them - would like to secede from the City of San Diego. But they have carefully carved out the UC-San Diego campus - which pays no property taxes - and left it to San Diego. From the San Diego Union-Tribune:

A new effort to make La Jolla its own city appears to be more formidable than previous drives for independence and is being spurred by a more complicated mix of motivations. Efforts to make La Jolla its own city separate from San Diego date back to the 1940s and emerge roughly once a decade. But previous tries have lacked funding, stopped short of proposing specific boundaries and typically focused on one or two issues.

Community leaders behind the latest effort have already paid a consultant for a financial analysis they expect to unveil this summer, and this spring, they released detailed maps of the proposed city of La Jolla. This time, they are motivated in part by decaying infrastructure they say San Diego doesn’t have the capacity to fix, neglected amenities like parks and concerns that San Diego’s efforts to spur more dense housing could damage La Jolla’s character...

For the effort to succeed, they must secure approval from a majority of voters in both La Jolla and then the entire city of San Diego...

Full story at https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2023-05-30/la-jolla-cityhood-why-secede-now-who-might-benefit.

As the story notes, getting approval would require voters in San Diego to approve the transfer, not an easy project. As far as yours truly knows, UC-San Diego has not taken a position on the proposal.

A Newly-Revealed Transfer Problem

UC (and UCLA in particular) are under pressure from the legislature and governor to accept more transfer students from community colleges. One problem - apart from the mechanisms for transfering - is that community college enrollment has fallen. Now comes the revelation that a fifth of community college applicants are scams to obtain cash from Pell grants and the like. 

Presumably, at least some of these fake students make their way into enrollment data for the community colleges. (The revelation may remind some readers of the scams that obtained billions in fake California pandemic-related unemployment insurance claims.) From the San Francisco Chronicle: 

...Fake enrollments...  crowd out legitimate students and create hours of work for colleges trying to eliminate “ghost students.” Colleges that disburse grants to fraudsters are on the hook to repay the feds. Today, about 20% of California’s community college applications are scams: more than 460,000 of the 2.3 million requests to the state’s online application system since July alone, says the state Chancellor’s Office, which oversees the 116 campuses. Community colleges are required to accept any student in the state with a high school diploma, and a Social Security number is not required to apply...

The system’s screening software blocked just half of the fraudsters, while the rest slipped through to try to enroll in online classes, then use their bogus student status to seek financial aid — at which point they must provide valid identification...

Full story at https://www.sfchronicle.com/california/article/college-aid-scam-18119117.php.

The fact that there are a significant number of fake community college students means that enrollment at the colleges is actually below recorded levels, making it that much more difficult for UC to obtain the transfer students the legislature wants.

Nothing to See Here (but we await the June UCLA Forecast)

Our regular weekly search in California data on new weekly claims for unemployment insurance continues to reveal no sign of recession. Things are where they were in the prepandemic (boom) period. The June projections from the UCLA Anderson Forecast will be out this coming Wednesday. We'll see what the Forecast has to say.

As always, the latest claims data are at https://www.dol.gov/ui/data.pdf.

UCLA History: Vermont Ave. Campus

Caption reads, "(1922) - Aerial view of the old Vermont Avenue campus of the University of California, Los Angeles, which later became Los Angeles City College. Vermont Avenue runs from the bottom of the photo to the right."

Source: https://waterandpower.org/museum/Early_Views_of_UCLA.html.

Student-Worker Strike Repercussions - Part 13 (CSU spillover)

What happened at UC did not go unnoticed at CSU. From the LA Times yesterday:

Cameron Macedonio clocks 30 to 40 hours each week running Cal State Fullerton’s campus radio station, Titan Radio. As general manager, he oversees a 12-person staff and dozens of disc jockeys for the 24-hour broadcast, at a salary of $15.50 an hour. But the Cal State system only allows students to work 20 hours a week — so Macedonio doesn’t get compensated for much of the time he puts in. “I’m pretty much on call at all times for the station,” said Macedonio, 20, a rising fourth-year journalism major.

Expanding students’ work hours is one issue, in addition to higher salaries and paid sick leave, that Macedonio hopes to address by forming a union. He is among more than 4,000 student assistants across CSU’s 23 campuses, working in jobs from IT support to receptionist, who submitted paperwork in April seeking to hold a vote on whether to unionize. If the campaign is successful, the union would be the largest representing nonacademic undergraduate student employees in the country, according to the Cal State University Employees Union, which hopes to add the students to the more than 15,000 support staff already on its membership rolls.

For student workers, campus jobs are a lifeline that provides critical income. Faced with soaring costs for housing, groceries and other necessities, some students have been forced to supplement those jobs with other gigs off campus.

The unionization push at Cal State follows other labor uprisings led by low-paid workers in education. Tens of thousands of academic workers at the University of California won wage increases and improved benefits after walking off the job for six weeks last year. In March, support staff won similar concessions from the Los Angeles Unified School District after a three-day strike...

“It was just the solidarity of so many people across all of California,” said Grayce Honsa, a political science and women’s studies major at San Diego State University. “If the UC students can do it, then why can’t we?”

It often doesn’t take much to convince student workers to unionize, they said — “It’s overall not feeling supported by CSU as a system.” ...

Over the next several months, the California Public Employment Relations Board will determine whether union organizers fulfilled the requirement that at least 30% of eligible workers signed cards requesting a unionization vote.

Cal State employed about 19,500 student assistants in March, a university spokesperson told The Times. That would bring the 30% threshold to 5,850, leaving the organizers short with their roughly 4,000 signatures.

The organizers said the university had not shared staffing figures until recently, making the campaign more difficult. The positions the university included on its list of eligible workers will be a point of contention going forward.

Cal State officials have the power to bypass the process and voluntarily allow a vote but have thus far signaled no intent to do so.

Assemblymember Ash Kalra (D-San Jose) and Sen. Dave Cortese (D-San Jose) have written to interim CSU Chancellor Jolene Koester and Wenda Fong, chair of the system’s board of trustees, urging them to “quickly enter into an election agreement.” ...

Full story at https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-06-03/campus-jobs-are-a-lifeline-for-these-csu-students-heres-why-they-want-to-unionize.

Strange Take on People's Park

EdSource carries a rather strange article on the People's Park affair. Excerpt:

UC Berkeley continues with People’s Park student housing development despite continued resistance

When they first moved from their semi-rural hometown, Rico Marisol found the bustle of Berkeley stress-inducing. In early 2021, as a sophomore at the University of California Berkeley, they found solace under the tall, old trees of People’s Park. UC Berkeley cut down those trees last summer, in preparation for student housing construction on the site, facing pressure due to only having enough on-campus housing to support 20% of its students. Some students, like Marisol, said they are fighting against the development to defend the park’s history, green space, unhoused population and community assistance services.

The development has been shrouded in controversy since UC Berkeley announced its intentions for the park, located a tenth of a mile from the south side of campus. And most recently, a nonprofit developer pulled out of the project due to the legal limbo surrounding it...

Full story at https://edsource.org/2023/uc-berkeley-continues-with-peoples-park-student-housing-development-despite-continued-resistance/691501.

One might suppose, particularly from the headline, that the project is moving forward. In fact, it is stalled by litigation and an adverse court decision. The article itself notes the withdrawal of the developer-partner in the planned construction of student housing. Possibly, either an appeal of the decision or action by the state legislature will open the door to moving ahead. But what stopped the project initially - before the adverse court decision - was a large demonstration. It's not clear, even if the litigation blockage is removed, what UC-Berkeley (and the City of Berkeley which supports the university's plan) will do in the face of renewed demonstrations.

Everyone's Into Data

As we noted in a recent posting, UC-Berkeley has set up a whole data college, approved by the Regents.* Everyone else is in one way or another joining the rush:

From the Bruin: The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health announced it will offer a new master’s degree in data science in health. The degree program, launched by the school’s biostatistics department, aims to address challenges in data science specific to health-related data, including the design and analysis of clinical trials, said Sudipto Banerjee, chair of the Department of Biostatistics. Hua Zhou, the program’s director, said courses will have both in-person and online components, allowing people employed full-time to enroll in the program along with recent graduates.

Ron Brookmeyer, dean of the School of Public Health, said in an emailed statement that with the increased prominence of electronic health data, he believes it is important to provide students and professionals with the skills to work with it...

Full story at https://dailybruin.com/2023/05/31/school-of-public-health-announces-new-masters-degree-in-data-science-in-health.

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2023/05/you-can-bet-other-uc-chancellors-are.html.