At a Buck a Day, It’s a Wise Investment for UC Students : Education: With severe cuts looming in all state spending, a little extra in student fees will ensure the diplomas they’ll earn will still be worth something.

Gloomy fiscal weather has darkened spring commencements at all of the 20 California State University campuses this year. Extraordinary state budget pain has put the University at risk, with reduction proposals ranging from 8% to more than double that.

At the same time, predictable student opposition has greeted Gov. Pete Wilson’s proposal to make up part of the Cal State shortfall with fees. But the alternative of lower quality and fewer classes is ultimately self-defeating. To students in particular, roughly a buck a day should seem a small price for preserving access to a degree that is worth having.

Cal State budget cuts will come on top of reductions made in the 1991-92 academic year, when the system failed to serve 11,000 students after slashing faculty and administrative positions, holding salaries flat, inflicting severe cuts on libraries and laboratories, allowing leaking roofs to go unrepaired, and more.

In a word, fewer students were served less well.

In the spring, campus budget conversations began with proposed “hits” to familiar targets. Campuses will again hold vacant some administrative positions, will send pink slips to even more part-time and temporary faculty and staff, and will cut still further the budgets for library subscriptions, photocopies, computers, test tubes and travel to professional conferences.

But last year’s reductions came on top of short rations that have prevailed since the mid-1980s. The independent legislative analyst puts the cumulative shortfall for the Cal State system at $219 million, and there’s just not much wiggle-room left.

Thus this year’s focus has turned with a vengeance to slashing both quality and access.

On the lost quality side, CSU campuses in 1992-93 will feature larger class sizes, and little or no professional development for faculty. Selected degree programs will be closed. Some academic departments will be merged. Some courses will be taught, not by discipline specialists, but by faculty from neighboring fields.

On the lost access side, after taking awful reductions in quality, the CSU at best will fail to serve a number of students equal to a middle-sized campus. Worst-case scenarios indicate failing to serve the equivalent of two or three large campuses-worth of students.

In the short run, no one will suffer more from this than current students. The “roach motel syndrome” threatens them with being able to get in but not get out, as class offerings are reduced.

Yet declining quality threatens them still more in the long run. After all, it is CSU alumni who frame and display Cal State degrees. Current students, soon to be alums, ought to care greatly that their diplomas will be worth framing.

The proposed fee increase of $372 a year would not make up the deficit. But it would stave off at least some of the damage, and would open an estimated 2,400 class sections.

Compellingly, it stands alone as a policy proposal with a chance to partially cushion the fall. Sacramento has no general fund budget help to offer. It’s an election year, anti-tax sentiment is strong, even the public schools have budget pain in their immediate future, and the recession lingers.

Without the increase, Cal State campuses will start to look like the University of South-East North Dakota at Hoople (a fictional place), whose degree isn’t worth having.

More than anyone else--more than faculty, more than administrators, and certainly more than ordinary taxpayers--students should not want that. In this budget, fiscal and political climate, a fee increase of about a buck a day is in students’ best interests, and they ought to tell that to their legislators.