UC’s Hike in Tuition Fees Approved Amid Protests

A controversial proposal to raise tuition fees at the University of California that could increase the cost of an MBA there, including the Haas MBA, by as much as US$28,000 in five years won approval on Thursday, amid angry protests from students.

The regents voted 14-7 to approve the increase proposed by UC president Janet Napolitano. It will increase tuition fees by as much as 5% for each of the next five years for all graduate and undergraduate students in the massive UC system, but the final amount depends on the state of California’s funding allocation for UC each year.

At the regents meeting in San Francisco Thursday, students formed a human chain to block board members from entering the meeting. Once inside, board members had to shout their votes over students chanting “Hey, hey, ho, ho, tuition hikes have got to go,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

A day earlier, hundreds of students tried to stop a meeting where a board committee gave preliminary approval for the hike in tuition fees, getting into pushing matches with police, while dozens of students occupied a classroom building on the Berkeley campus – home to the Haas MBA - overnight in protest.

The protests were reminiscent of those that broke out throughout the UC system in 2009 in response to hikes that saw tuition fees triple over the past decade, with some hikes as high as 30% in a single year.

Before Thursday’s vote. UC Davis student Amelia Itnyre, 23, told the board through tears that the board’s action “made me sick to my stomach.”

“Students…we aren’t just angry, we are sad,” she said, according to news accounts. “You should be crying, you should be praying, you should be figuring out what you are going to do to fix this.”

“This is not just $612 more a year. This is rent. This is another job they need to get. This is food they cannot buy,” said Sadia Saifuddin, a student member of the regents who voted against the increases. “Let’s get real about the situation. Students have always had to pay the price for financial mismanagement by the board and the state.”

Haas MBA high on list of affected programs

Thursday’s vote, which ends a three-year tuition freeze, means tuition fees in the UC system can increase by as much as 5% a year for the next five years. It would increase the cost of an MBA at four of the system’s top five programs, including the Haas MBA at Berkeley as well as those at Irvine, Davis and San Diego. (It would not affect tuition at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, which became “self-sufficient”—forgoing state aid entirely—in 2013.) But just how much depends on a number of factors.

The annual increases could be reduced or even eliminated if state funding for the UC system grows by more than 4% per year, and they will only affect one type of fee currently paid by UC students: the system-wide university fees. Those fees, currently set at US$12,192 for all students (graduate and undergraduate, resident and nonresident) would increase as much as US$612 next year.

It also permits the UC president to increase professional degree supplemental tuition fees (PDST), such as those paid by MBA students, by as much as 5% per year, but no increase has so far been approved, and most likely won’t be until next summer. It does not affect California nonresident tuition—a separate fee tacked on to the system-wide fees and nonresident PDST.

In a worst-case scenario, with both the system-wide and PDST fees increasing by the maximum 5% per year, Thursday’s vote means that annual tuition for Berkeley’s in-state Haas MBA students could increase by as much as US$14,000 a year to nearly US$65,000, increasing the cost of the two-year program by as much as US$28,000 by 2019-20.  The impact on nonresidents and those at less expensive programs would be less. And to some extent middle-class families and those receiving financial aid would not bear the full burden of the increases.

The increases were said to be needed to help foot the bill for employee pay and retirement benefits, hire more faculty, and serve more students.