UC Students Across California Protest Huge Rate Hike

UCLA students protested Wednesday as regents were meeting to approve a massive fee hike. Photo by the Associated Press

The UC Regents are expected to OK an enormous tuition hike of 32 percent today – but students there are not going to make it easy for them.

At UCLA, a key board committee met Wednesday and approved the increase, and was interrupted several times (police arrested several demonstrators). Students there gathered early this morning and barricaded Campbell Hall with chains and bike locks. A large group had slept outside on campus in preparation. The protesting group included students from other Southern California UC campuses, according to the L.A. Times.

At Berkeley, close to 1,000 students and faculty members protested the Wednesday vote in a rally on campus.

Students and faculty members expressed their anguish and disappointment that the new fees would effectively shut out many poor and minority students.

“Say goodbye to diversity,” Corey Matthews, chairman of the Afrikan American Student Union at UCLA, told the regents during a public comment period, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

Matthews might be right. Back in September, I noted a survey that ranked schools in terms of economic diversity, measured by the percentage of students at those institutions receiving Pell grants for low-income families. UCLA and UC Berkeley ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively.

California is the crown jewel of our nation’s public higher education system. The fact that it’s being crippled by money issues should be a wake-up call – as if we needed another – to the state’s leaders that without real, substantive changes to the way the state is managed, the UC system will inevitably lose much of its luster, and promising but poor students will be the ones who lose out most.