Final Remarks

I began my career at UC Riverside in 1984. My career encompassed a continuous period of disinvestment by the State of California, offset only somewhat by rising tuition.  Rather than provide sufficient funding, legislators instead asked the University to become more “efficient,” teaching more students with less money.  For example, around 1985, the UC Riverside had a student-to-faculty- ratio of about 14:1 and advertised itself as a campus where students could actually get to know their professors.  When I retired in 2016, UC Riverside had one of the highest student-to faculty ratios in the system – 29:1, well above the budgeted goal of 18.7:1.

In 1985, approximately 5.5% of the State’s general fund expenditures were allocated to the University of California, whereas in 2016, only about 2.8% of the State’s general funds were so allocated. The chart below shows that, since 1985, the State’s portion of expenditures per student declined in inflation-adjusted dollars from about $20,000 to $7,780 today. This is more than a 60% reduction in state support The increases in student tuition and UC contributions over the same time period made up less than half of that reduction, leaving the per-student average expenditures to decline over $5,500 from about $24,410 in inflation-adjusted dollars in 1985 to $18,900 in 2016. That savings over the past 30 years might be celebrated as a gain of more than 20% in teaching efficiency.

There are hidden costs to that efficiency, however.  The high student-to-faculty ratio requires pending less time with individual students and changing both the means of instruction and how students are evaluated to accommodate more students in the same amount of time. The University has ~10 years’ of longitudinal data  on student satisfaction and outcomes from the biennial University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey (UCUES).  Recent results show general declines in 1) overall satisfaction of students with their education, 2) the proportion of students who, knowing what they know now, would have still enrolled, 3) the fraction of students who can get into their first-choice major, and 4) the fraction of students who are likely to know at least one professor well enough to request a letter of recommendation.  All of these indicators show that any gain in teaching efficiency by increasing class size has extracted a cost on student outcomes.

Another approach to try to teach more students was to redirect funds for janitorial services, maintenance, and deferred maintenance to teaching.  That contributed to the current deferred maintenance cost of at least $480 M at UC Riverside and about $8 B Systemwide, not to mention creating dingy, run-down campuses.  A recent newspaper article accurately painted a bleak picture of the Riverside campus, though I do not agree that the causes are all due current funding policies.  Those of us with a long history with the campus are familiar with the strategy of overenrolling students to justify hiring more faculty and staff, then using those numbers to attempt to justify funds for additional buildings.  The strategy may have worked during the good economic years, but it also left the campus precariously overenrolled and under-resourced when the State experienced economic downturns, especially during the dot-com bust and the Great Recession.  The history of growth at Riverside in the absence of appropriate funding may have contributed more to the current status of the Riverside campus than more recent members of the campus might realize. 

Taken together, the increase in student-to-faculty ratios and the decline in campus infrastructure strongly suggest that UC probably is not offering the same quality of education to today’s students as it did to their parents a generation ago.  Indeed, the UCUES results suggest that UC may not be offering the same quality of education to today’s students as it did to their older siblings.

In my last remarks to the Regents in July, 2016, I focused upon what I thought was the fundamental existential question for the University of California:  “How do we fund a selective, high-quality public university out of the public treasury if the public treasury is not prepared to pay extra for quality?” If UC cannot maintain the marginal cost of instruction and also invest in new infrastructure, then I think we need to carefully consider what type of education UC is offering as it expands enrollment. If UC cannot maintain the quality of its education, then we must ask if UC is serving students well simply by providing more of them access to the campuses. 

Legislators need to understand that the quality of a UC education is by no means permanent and guaranteed.  By prioritizing access and not properly funding additional enrollment and infrastructure, legislators may find themselves offering more students a “UC education” in name only, then wondering why future UC graduates are less capable than past graduates.