UC-AFT has been on the
forefront of pushing for the UC system to enroll more students from California,
and recent data shows that 2016-2017 will see an increase of 8,000 students in
this category. The bad news is that the
unequal funding of the campuses continues due to the distribution of
non-resident students. The following
list shows the percentage of Freshmen enrollments that are non-resident students
at each campus:
Berkeley 25.2%
(down 3.7% from last year)
Davis 21.1%
(down 4.8%)
Irvine 27.2%
(down .2%)
UCLA 26.6%
(down 2.7%)
Merced .7%
(down .3%)
Riverside 3.8%
(down .2%)
San Diego 28.6% (down 4.8%)
UCSB 16.1% (up 1%)
UCSC 12.7% (down 3.8%)
UC 20% (down 2.7%)
These trends highlight a
partial movement in the direction requested by the legislature: the campuses with the highest number of
non-resident students have decreased their over-all percentage. Yet, only UCSB increased its percentage of
non-resident students and only by 1%.
UCOP has said that they wanted a more even distribution, but we still
have three campuses with over 25% (Irvine, UCLA, Berkeley) and four campuses
under 16.2% (Riverside, UCSC, UCSB, Merced).
These statistics are important because the tuition for non-resident
students is $26,682 more than resident students. So if Berkeley has 1,603 non-resident
students, and Riverside has 213, Berkeley brings in $37 million more than
Riverside. Since according to UCOP, the main reason for bringing in high-paying
non-resident students is that they subsidize the resident students, it is still
hard to see how this is working when campuses do not share extra revenue
amongst themselves. In other words,
Berkeley does not transfer any of its $42 million in additional revenue from
non-resident tuition to the other campuses.
It is important to stress
that these statistics only look at one year of non-resident Freshmen
enrollments, and if we look at all of the undergrads at a particular campus, we
can multiply by four to get a rough estimate of the total inequity among
campuses. So if the average student stays four years and the enrollment trends
stay the same, Berkeley’s extra funding over Riverside becomes $148 million a
year.
It is important to stress
that the UC campuses have also increased their number of transfer students, and
in this case, for Fall 2016, 15% are non-resident students (this has stayed
about the same as last year). We also
see inequities generated here since only 4.8% of transfer students to Santa
Cruz pay non-resident tuition, but 23.8% of the UC San Diego students pay the
additional $26,682.
This year we will be working on
trying to get the campuses to find a more equitable way of sharing non-resident
revenue.
