What is the Problem?
You know the UC is hurting. Your fees are going up, libraries are closed, staff is getting furloughed — you’re paying more for less.
What you might not know is a proposal in the state legislature would seriously help. Democrats in Sacramento are trying to insert into this year’s state budget something called a “tuition buyout.” In essence, the legislature would pay this year’s fee hike for students.
Too bad it probably won’t happen. In California, every budget must be passed with 66% support in both houses of the legislature. Democrats are just over 60% of both the Assembly and Senate, meaning that they write a progressive budget every year that funds public higher education, and then Republicans get to pick and choose what they want to cut before they sign on. If a budget could be passed by a simple 50% majority, the tuition buyout might become a reality.
This isn’t the first time the 66% requirement for passing a budget has hurt the UC. In last year’s budget, Democrats wanted to pull $1.2 billion from the prison budget and put it to public higher education and social services. If you’re a student dealing with cutbacks, we don’t have to tell you what $1.2 billion could have done for the UC’s funding crisis. But because Democrats were just a few votes short of the 66% requirement for passing a budget, they had to bend to the will of the minority. The $1.2 billion went back to prisons.
Proposition 25, an initiative on the November ballot, would lower the requirement for passing a budget in California from 66% to 50%. It would give control of a progressive state back to progressives. And it would help save the UC.
