<p>[UC</a> proposes 20 percent tuition hike if tax fails - San Jose Mercury News](<a href=“UC proposes 20 percent tuition hike if tax fails – The Mercury News”>UC proposes 20 percent tuition hike if tax fails – The Mercury News)</p>
<p>How did California rack up so much debt anyways?</p>
<p>1980 - California general fund 20 Billion - 38% for k-14 (CC level) and about 10% to ‘higher ed’</p>
<p>2010 California general fund 91Billion 38% for K-14, and around 8% to ‘higher ed’. The difference…the first time Moonbeam was in office he enacted guaranteed funding for K-14. (talking about the unions, pensions and other such areas will make this political so…)</p>
<p>Higher Ed has no such guaranteed funding, so it is a political ploy to threaten cutting higher ed since it is not POSSIBLE to cut K-14. This is in no way a funding issue, it is a fiduciary management issue. Giving an alcoholic another drink does not solve the problem</p>
<p>Prison spending has greatly increased due to laws like the “three strikes” law (where the third strike can be any felony, not limited to “serious or violent” felonies as the law specifies the first two strikes have to be). It is a windfall to the CCPOA (which has both the Ds and Rs in their pocket most of the time) but crowds out other things in the budget.</p>
<p>ucbalumnus has hit the nail on the head. It is indeed perverse the way we spend increasing amount of money on our prison systems and less on education. The way we are going in this country, soon we will have no public education - will be sold to private sector. It is bound to happen with such low voter turnout in elections - public policies are changing quietly while the citizenry is doing 2-3 jobs to make their ends meet. And public opinions are manipulated by false data all the time.</p>
<p>The Kochs would have been great generals in the olden days!</p>
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<p>The public is not blameless. Too often people vote on something thinking of it in isolation (e.g. minimum K-12 school funding, longer prison sentences leading to more prison spending, making it more difficult to raise taxes, special tax that can only be spent on a specific purpose, etc.) without considering the effect it has on everything else (e.g. voting to raise spending without raising taxes to pay for it, or voting to cut or limit taxes without cutting spending to compensate). Much of the California state budget is already prescribed by various propositions with no or very little capability for the legislature to change it. But UC and CSU funding is not one of the “protected” or “forced” (by propositions previously voted on) categories of the budget. Since UC and CSU funding is a relatively large category of the unprotected unforced parts of the budget, it bears the brunt of any cuts needed to balance the budget.</p>
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<p>Then perhaps that’s the key: UC/CSU ought to launch a successful proposition campaign. Given the bevy of superstar statistics, political science, psychology, and business-school marketing professors that UC/CSU employ, constructed and promoting a craftily worded proposition designed to maximize the number of votes. You could start as an elementary first step by having the statisticians run a thorough regression analysis upon the data set of all prior propositions that passed or failed to determine the key words or phrases that seem to be highly correlated with proposition passage, and then construct a proposition built upon the successful key phrases. The marketing and political science professors could then test any prototype proposition upon focus groups as part of their ‘research’. </p>
<p>One vexing and frustrating aspect of UC/CSU is that the faculty, while undoubtedly learned and ingenious, rarely seem to use their knowledge to effect practical results. UC/CSU is engaged in a perpetual War for Budget - but it’s a war that they don’t really seem interested in fighting. In contrast, you better believe that the teachers unions, corrections officers unions, and other California special interest groups are keenly motivated in fighting and winning that battle. UC/CSU, with its impressive knowledge base of human behavior, ought to be dominant. Instead, the other special interests keep eating UC/CSU’s lunch. Why?</p>