By Gov. Jerry Brown’s state budget proposal sent the Cal State University atwitter two weeks ago, as the proposal revealed a “renewed investment” in higher education by providing an additional $250 million in state funding to the system.
But, now the question is, what to do with the new potential funding?
Brown joined the CSU Board of Trustees – the first to be held by new CSU Chancellor Timothy P. White – in Dumke Auditorium yesterday to begin discussions on the funding.
During the Board meeting, Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer Benjamin Quillian cited that the budget proposal “falls considerably short” of the Board’s $371.9 million request for state funding in addition to its current baseline budget.
However, Quillian also said that the governor’s proposal is “not a path to the old ways of doing business, and it is consistent with the directions that we [the CSU] are already pursuing.”
The directions that Brown’s proposal urges the CSU toward include making more courses available for students through use of technology. The proposal allots $10 million to the CSU specifically for this goal.
CSU Spokesman Erik Fallis said that the proposal namely addresses making “bottleneck courses” more available for students, which are those courses that either prevent a student from graduating or from moving onto the next course.
Fallis said that the CSU’s recent launch of Cal State Online will help to make these bottleneck courses more available, along with a number of other technology initiatives and approaches that the system already has underway.
“The CSU is already engaged in making the changes and creating the efficiencies called for by the governor’s proposal,” Quillian said.
This potential increase in state funding is a stark contrast to the $750 million cut the CSU took in 2012-13, and the increase comes with a four-year plan that Quillian said was “very much to his liking.”
“It has been exceedingly difficult to try and plan the finances of this institution not knowing from one year to the next if we were going to get cut and how much we were going to get cut,” Quillian said.
The four-year plan included in the budget proposal allows for a 5 percent increase in state funding to the CSU in 2013-14 and 2014-15 as well as a subsequent 4 percent increase in the two following fiscal years.
Quillian said that this four-year plan comes with the expectation that tuition will not increase for the next four years.
Discussions of the budget proposal turned toward providing enough services for low-income or underprivileged students in the CSU, as Cal State Long Beach President F. King Alexander initiated the discussion by saying that many states have been successful in K-12 education by funding underprivileged students differently from suburban or richer students.
“If we apply the same principle to higher education, much of this goes on as well, but we’re reluctant to address it,” Alexander said.
However, during the meeting Brown argued that his budget proposal already addresses this at the K-12 level, thereby preparing students before reaching the CSU level and needing support then.
“I’m proposing a very bold formula that would give more money to those school districts that have more kids in foster care, more kids in low-income families, more kids that don’t speak English as a first language,” Brown said. “This is already a tall mountain to climb. Let’s climb that first, and if we do that, these kids will be better prepared.”
Fallis said that because the governor’s proposal provides less than the CSU requested, the 23-campus system will have to prioritize where the additional state funding is most needed.
“What the governor is proposing is less than we laid out, so what we will need to do is look at what we can actually achieve with those dollars,” Fallis said, “and it’s going to be, by nature, a matter of prioritization a matter of stretching our means and trying to find out what we can do that’s in the best interest of the students.”
