Looking to come up with a viable alternative to tuition hikes and spiraling student debt, a group of students at UC Riverside has come up with a plan that’s getting the attention of students and administrators across the state.
The proposal, known as FixUC, would mean that students would not have to pay tuition and fees while going through school. After graduation, 5 percent of their income would be paid to the UC system for 20 years. Those grads who choose to work within the state would only have to pay 4.5 percent. And those who take work in the public sector would see their percentage reduced to 4 percent.
“This is a serious proposal and the Regents have agreed to study it,” said Professor William Tierney, Director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at USC, in a phone interview. “What they are suggesting is a significant change, so it would involve a variety of different actors from the governor on down as well as people from within the UC system such as the faculty.”
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Dalton Runberg / The Collegian
The students who thought up this proposal run UC Riverside’s student paper, the Highlander. Editor-in-chief Chris LoCascio heads the FixUC group, which has its own website, FixUC.org, and Facebook page. “[With] student loans and students going back to live with their parents because they have to pay off these loans, this proposal outright avoids loans altogether,” LoCascio said in a recent phone interview. “There’s no debt involved so there’s no interest. It’s not like you graduate and then six months later you have a bill on your doorstep. It’s entirely dependent on your income,”.
The concept is not a new one. Professor Tierney says, “This is a proposal that is not the same but it is similar to the financial aid model that Australia uses, HECS. So it’s not something that is totally a hundred percent new, but it is new for the UC system.” Australia’s HECS (Higher Education Contribution Scheme) has been in use since 1989 and makes the collection of payments a category on graduates’ income tax return.
At the beginning of spring semester, Fresno State President John Welty announced that Fresno State may face more tuition increases and fee hikes, depending on the passage of tax increase measures on this November’s ballot. The CSU system is not alone in having to bear the brunt of a decline in state education funding. The UC system has seen tuition quadruple in the past several years.
Could FixUC be applied to the CSU system? LoCascio thinks so.
“I’ve had some preliminary conversations actually about applying this [proposal] to the CSU system, and although I’m not entirely familiar with the inner financial workings of the CSUs, I would expect that it would ultimately be cheaper, like possibly a smaller percentage for someone who is attending a CSU, but that is something that has to be looked into.”
Welty said via email from the CSU Board of Trustees meeting he is attending in Long Beach: “This proposal would require a thorough financial analysis to determine how it would be financed and sustained.”
That sentiment is echoed by a spokesperson for UC President Mark Yudof, who said in a phone interview: “The president is having his budget people look at it, but it is way too early to say what he thinks about it. He was impressed, as are many people at the students’ initiative and welcomes any well-thought-out ideas.”
Dean Bob Harper of the Craig School of Business was not available for comment, but Mike Dozier, the Director of the Office of Community and Economic Development, a post formerly occupied by now-Fresno Mayor Ashley Sweringen, said in a phone interview last week, “I have to give credit that these people are thinking of options rather than complaining. It doesn’t take a high IQ to complain, but at least they have come up with an idea.”
LoCascio presented the FixUC plan to the Board of Regents when it met Thursday on the UC Riverside campus.
“It went really well,” LoCascio said. “Even before I made my speech to the Regents, President Yudof acknowledged the proposal and said he would be studying it with his financial staff. So that was already a good sign. But later that day, I got to speak with him in person, and we’re actually going to be meeting in the relatively near future to discuss it even further, so things are looking up.”
The proposal has garnered interest among students, as well. Fresno State student Vanessa Ruiz said in a recent interview: “I think it’ll help the students while we’re not worrying about tuition and stuff like that. And so it would be a good idea to do. Because after graduating you have to get a job and from there on you’ll be paying without worrying while you’re in school, you know?”
Others, like student Adil LeMat disagree: “I believe that you should pay while you’re going to school and in that way what is exactly going to happen is it will motivate you and it will make a timetable in your head that will start to acheive this goal.”
But there are some who have questioned the plan’s projections, which allow for the possibility that only 60 percent of graduates may get work after graduation. Robyne Hamme, a career coach at the Fresno State Career Center, commented in a recent interview: “I think that people who are going to have greater earnings potential are going to be less inclined to do it because they’re going to understand that they’re going to be carrying a greater burden than people who don’t anticipate earning a lot of money. So it’s hard for me to picture it getting any traction.”
LoCascio explained: “You know the way we calculated our numbers, we did so very conservatively so we accounted for only 60 percent of graduates getting jobs at $50,000 per year. That’s about the average for a UC graduate. Even with those conservative numbers, which I guess anyone would agree are catastrophic like if we had 40 percent unemployment, so even under those extremely conservative numbers this model worked very well.”
As Tierney said, “It would involve a variety of different actors from the governor on down as well as people from within the UC system such as the faculty. So I see this as a beginning discussion that could take multiple years.”
Even so, the proposal is set to phase in over a period of up to six years and would start with the conversion of UC’s Blue and Gold students, which is the UC system’s method of aiding students whose parents make less than $80,000 per year. Under the proposal, more and more Blue and Gold funds would be freed up as class graduates freeing up more university money to fund more students getting on the plan. After six years the, according to FixUC’s document calculations, Post-Graduation Contributions (PGC) would surpass original tuition revenue by the seventh year of the plan and continue to go up year after year as more graduates contribute to the program
Hamme at the Career Center has questioned the mechanism of repayment.
“How do you keep track of everyone and how do you enforce the payments?” she asked. However, the plan proposes a new office in charge of collection, similar to the California State Franchise Tax Board, be created to handle collections.
Removing student loan debt from the UC and CSU systems could also potentially help ease some of the state’s economic woes as well as allow students to concentrate on taking work in their field of study. As LoCascio said: “The proposal would encourage people to really pursue what they want to pursue as opposed to doing things or getting jobs that would just help them repay their loans. So, I personally think it would give more power to graduates to kind of free themselves from the burden of that kind of debt.”
What remains clear is that any new system of handling the cost of going to California universities is some years away. As Tierney concludes: “It is one of many proposals that I’m sure the Regents need to consider seriously, but I don’t expect them to provide any thoughts about it for a good while.”