Questions about the UC Budget Deal

The recent state budget agreement has brought up many important issues for the UC system.  Here are some of my top questions:

1)   What is the current status of the deal made between President Napolitano and Governor Brown?  Did the state budget deal certify or nullify the original pact? For example, the earlier pact clearly calls for the option of new employees to pick a define contribution plan, but the state budget does not include this. The original deal also has the state giving UC $436 million over three years for the pension, but the state budget only mentions one year of funding ($96 million).  Is the deal with the governor like the deal the governor thought he had last year with UC, which prevented any tuition increases for four years?

2)   What happened to UCOP?s claim that it needed to raise tuition 5% over the next five years in order to maintain excellence?  It is clearly getting less money, and the new money can only be used to pay down the pension liability.  Was the earlier claim only a bargaining ploy, or does the UC really need more money than it is getting? 

3)   What is the status of all of the non-monetary issues (online ed, time to degree, three-year degrees, transfer rates) contained in the Brown and Napolitano agreement?  First of all, aren?t these areas the domain of the faculty senate? 

4)   What exactly did the UC get in terms of enrollment funding?  The state says they can get an additional $25 million if they promise to do many different things, including adding 5,000 additional students from California, but how did the legislature come up with the figure of $5,000 per additional student? Is this the result of UC?s continued refusal to come up with a fact-based analysis of how much it costs to educate each additional undergraduate student?

5)   What happened to all of the legislation about sharing non-resident tuition among the campuses? There was a lot of sound and fury about this issue, but in the end, it appeared to be dropped.

6)   Did Napolitano really get anything by taking on the governor in such an aggressive fashion?  Yes, she may have commandeered more funding for the pension, but at what price?  Not only will the UC have to introduce a pension calculation salary cap for new hires, but it also may end up introducing a very bad defined contribution plan that could ultimately work to defund the defined benefit pension plan and hurt the retirement of many future workers.  Also, what does it say about an institution when it leaders says don?t worry about the changes because they only affect future workers?

You can post your answers below, or email me at bobsamuels_us@yahoo.com

Free Public Higher Ed Goes Viral

When I published my book Why Public Higher Education Should be Free two years ago, I felt like a lone, crazy voice in the wilderness, but recently we have seen many initiatives to attain the goal of debt-free public higher education.  President Obama helped to shape the debate by promoting a plan to make the first two years of community college free. The president?s policy drew from the Tennessee experiment with free communitycollege and other similar programs that have emerged around the country.  Following the president?s lead, members of Congress signed on to a resolutionto make all public higher education debt free, and presidential contender, Bernie Sanders has made free public higher education the cornerstone of his campaign.

The central argument I have been making is that our current system does not work: in the last three decades, we have spent trillions ofdollars on financial aid and higher tax breaks, and the result is that students coming from families in the top income quartile have a 77% chance of attaining acollege degree, and students from the bottom 25% have a 9% rate.  Moreover, not only have students been forced to take out over $1.3 trillion dollars of debt, but as more students go to college, the US has moved from 1st to 12th in college attainment.  

Just as many of our K-12 schools have become self-segregated by class and race, our institutions of higher education have also becomeseparate and unequal. Low-income Black and Brown students tend to go to low-funded community colleges with low graduation rates, while wealthier students attend wealthy universities with high graduation rates.  In fact, the celebrated California Master Plan was founded on a principle of hierarchy and has resulted in a system of  de facto segregation.  

In order to make higher education an engine of social mobility and not a generator of economic inequality, we have to rethink how we fund these institutions.  Instead of using an ad hoc voucher system that provides aid to individual students, the federal government needs to send funds directly to institutions with a strict set of requirements, including a maintenance of state funding, a cap on tuition and room and board increases, and a financial aid system that makes the total cost of attendance free for low- and moderate-income students.

What needs to be realized first is that no single state or institution can fix this problem on its own.  There has to be a joint federal-state-institution compact because we have aid coming from all of these different sources.  Bernie Sanders believes that we should fund this type of program through a new financial transaction tax, but as I argued on a recent radio show and on a Fox News debate, a more effective strategy would be to use money currently going to tax breaks and tax exemptions to make higher education free and accessible. 

In the current system, wealthy individuals and wealthyinstitutions are being subsidized through taxation policies catering to thesuper-rich. Not only do private universities with tax-exempt, multi-billion dollar endowments allow wealthy individuals to escape taxation through charitable giving, but these institutions run tax-exempt enterprises without paying local property taxes.  Meanwhile, wealthy individuals have turned to 529 College Savings plans as a new tax shelter. 

All of the tax breaks dedicated to high-income individuals and institutions help to decrease state and federal tax revenue, and this reduction of funds creates an environment where politicians can say they have no money for public higher education.  What citizens have to fight for is integrated, debt-free public higher education, and this can be done by taking on the higher ed tax subsidies for the wealthy.   

For more updates on free public higher education, click here.  

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly Budget Deal

The deal between President Napolitano and Governor Brown is a mixed bag.   On the one hand, the plan brings more money to the system than many expected, and the governor does increase support for the UC pension plan. The deal also buys out the undergrad tuition increases for the next two years, but the graduate and professional schools fees are free to increase.  Finally, the plan allows for non-resident tuition to increase 8% each year, and the governor has promised that he will not block a legislative effort to add more money for enrollment growth.

On the bad side, the deal was negotiated by two leaders without any real effort at shared governance.  In fact, the university will still have to negotiate with unions and faculty over pension reform measures.  Like the fast-tracking of free trade agreements, this method of negotiation values secrecy over democracy.  As is often the case in the UC system, consultation occurs after a decision has been made, and this represents a fake form of democracy and shared governance.

The most threatening aspect of the plan is that it requires a new pension tier, but the details of the plan are not spelled out. A big concern is the talk of a defined contribution plan, which we have told the university is not only bad for the employees but also bad for the entire shared defined benefit plan.  History shows that once you allow employees to opt into a reduced benefit, the main benefit plan becomes destabilized.  

Attention now turns to the legislature where there are many competing plans for UC.  Just as UC employees are concerned about the lack of democracy in the Committee of Two, legislators are surely feeling squeezed out of the democratic process.

Does Instructional Quality Matter to the UC?

UC-AFT is currently bargaining with the UC administration over the terms and conditions of the contract regulating over 3,500 lecturers in the university system.  The majority of these lecturers are in their first six years, and according to the present contract, there is no obligation to review these faculty members.  In fact, in some programs, none of the faculty teaching the majority of required undergraduate courses have been reviewed in ten years.  The people representing the university at the table argue that lecturers should have no expectation of having a career until they pass their sixth-year review, and so it is not necessary to review their teaching and service before they come up for a continuing appointment.  Since most lecturers never make it to their sixth year, this means that the university does not think it is important to judge the quality of instruction for the majority of lecturers. 

When we have pushed the people at the bargaining table to explain why they do not think teachers should be evaluated, we are told that it would be too time consuming and costly to do the reviews.  In other words, instructional quality is such a low priority that the administration does not think it is worth the time or effort to review the effectiveness of instructors. 

As a union, we have been placed in the strange position of demanding that the university review our members as we insist on a high bar for quality instruction.  We have also been forced to develop a contract that can protect against the constant turnover of lecturers.  Since the administration does not think that these teachers in their first six years should have any expectation of continued employment, departments and programs have been able to replace experienced faculty with inexperienced teachers to prevent expert lecturers from gaining any job security.

The university also insists that lecturers working less than half time should have no benefits including social security and pension.   In fact, a majority of lecturers are now hired on a quarterly basis and have no way of knowing when and how much they will be teaching in the future.  Some of the quarterly appointments have been teaching in the UC for over twenty years and still they have no job security. 

We are proud that our contract is one of the best in the country for non-tenure-track faculty, but there are still majors problems with the way the administration views and treats the people teaching more than 35% of the undergraduate student credit hours and a majority of the required undergraduate courses. We need a contract that will protect the quality of undergraduate instruction by evaluating lecturers in an effective manner. 

Duke University

Washington Duke. The Dukes, a Durham family that assembled an overall money related domain in the production of tobacco and created power creation in the Carolinas, long had been occupied with Trinity College. Trinity followed its establishes to 1838 in adjacent Randolph County when neighborhood Methodist and Quaker groups opened joint Institute. The school, after that called as Trinity College, moved to Durham in 1892. In December 1924, the procurements of James B. Duke's arrangement made the family altruistic establishment, The Duke Endowment, which accommodated the development of Trinity College into Duke University. As a consequence of the Duke blessing, Trinity experienced both physical and scholastic development. The first Durham grounds got to be known as East Campus when it was revamped in stately Georgian structural planning. West Campus, Gothic in style and overwhelmed by the taking off 210-foot tower of Duke, created in 1930. East college is the house of the Woman's College of Duke University until 1972, when the men's and ladies' undergrad schools combined. Both men and ladies students now enlist in either the Trinity College of Arts & Sciences or the Pratt School of Engineering. In 1995, East Campus turned into the home for all first-year understudies.

ACADEMICS
       Duke University comprises of 6471 undergraduates and 8379 graduates. The selection process of Duke University is highly selective. Duke is one of the toughest universities in the US in the selection process of its students. It has two schools of undergraduate?s i.e. Trinity college of Arts and Sciences and Pratt School of Engineering. Duke has provided the highest number of scholarships to its students. Among the admitted students, about 50% of the students are under different scholarship schemes provided by the university. Duke provides four engineering programs, 46 arts and sciences majors and 24 certificate programs are also available. Trinity's educational program works under the amended form of "Educational module 2000." It guarantees that understudies are presented to a mixture of "zones of learning" and "modes of inquiry." The educational module plans to help understudies create basic resources and judgment by figuring out how to get to, integrate, and impart information adequately. The goal is to help understudies in getting point of view on flow and authentic occasions, directing research and tackling issues, and building up diligence and a limit for hard and maintained work. Green beans can choose to take part in the FOCUS Program, which permits understudies to participate in an interdisciplinary investigation of a particular subject in a little gathering setting.  There are about 400 university college clubs and organizations running in the University.
Many notable alumni and Nobel scholars has been associated with the Duke University. Duke ranks among the top University in the world according to different statics published annually.

Peking University

Peking University, established in 1898, one of the pioneer research university of China. It is located in the landmark of Beijing. It is the first current national college created in China, established as the "Imperial University of Peking" in 1898 as a substitution of the antiquated Taixue or Guozijian, or Imperial Academy. It additionally served as the most elevated organization for instruction in China toward the start of its establishing. By 1920, it had turned into a core for dynamic thought. It has been reliably respected by both household and universal college rankings as, nearby Tsinghua University, the top higher learning establishment in mainland China.  Peking University is particularly popular for its campus architecture and the excellence of its customary Chinese construction modeling.

Peking University is a broad and National key university. The college, known as "Yan Yuan"- - the greenhouses of Yan, is arranged at the upper east of the Haidian District at the western rural areas of Beijing. It stands close to the Yuan Ming Gardens and the Summer Palace. The University comprises of 30 universities and 12 departments, with 93 groups of students, 2 for the second Bachelor's degree, 199 strengths for Master competitors and 173 fortes for Doctoral hopefuls. While as yet laying weight on essential sciences, the college has given careful consideration to the advancement of connected sciences. At present, Peking college has 216 exploration organizations and examination focuses, and there are 2 national engineering research institutions, 81 key national disciplines, 12 national key labs. The college has made a compelling mix of the exploration on essential exploratory issues with the preparation of staff with abnormal state particular information and expert aptitude as requested by the nation's communist modernization. It endeavors not just for the concurrent upgrades in showing and exploration work, additionally for the advancement of collaboration and common advancement among different subjects. Accordingly Peking University has turned into an inside for showing and exploration and a college of the new sort, comprising of assorted extensions of adapting, for example, unadulterated and connected sciences, sociologies and the humanities, and sciences of administration and instruction. Its point is to rank among the world's best colleges toward the start of the following century.

Academics

Peking University is the national research university. It comprises of 30 campuses and 12 faculties. Presently, Peking University has 216 research institutions and other educational centers which include 2 engineering research lab, 81 national key national disciples and 12 national labs. It has one of the largest libraries in Asia which comprise 4.5 million volumes. Peking University has always focused on practical and research based education and specialized knowledge in accordance with the modernization of the country. It is the top most university in the country so; it has been becoming the favorite educational destination to numbers of students of the country. It has been becoming the center for education and research which consists of diverse branches of learning such as applied sciences, humanities and management. Peking University ranks the top in the china and Asia.

         Peking University accepts nearly 2000 international students, studying in Beijing campus and other campus located in mainland China. Since its establishment, the University has produced many profound personalities in the country. Peking University has two Nobel Prize winners.

Peking University is growing as the topmost university in the world which aims in research of pure and applied sciences and advancement of education.

University of Tokyo

The University of Tokyo, one of the oldest and world class research universities, established in 1877 is located at the landmark of Bunkyo, Tokyo, the capital city of Japan. The University of Tokyo is commonly called as ?Todai? in Japanese accent. The university comprises of 10 faculties with 30,000 students including 2,100 foreign students who came to pursue their education here. The university has five colleges located in different places of Japan. The University of Tokyo is the topmost university in the whole Asia and ranks 21^st in the world.

As we all know, The University of Tokyo (Todai) is Japan's top college, a world-class place for examination, and an energetic scholastic group. World-class research Todai's scientists have been at the cutting edge of their fields following our establishment in 1877. Today, their front line explore consistently shows up in top universal diaries and has earned  Nobel prizes. Research at University of Tokyo over art sciences is both wide and profound, as expert information is imparted crosswise over conventional limits to further human comprehension. A strong instruction Todai's undergrad training stresses the aesthetic sciences for the procurement of solid bonding capabilities, a sound moral outlooks, and interdisciplinary awareness, altogether creating a stout foundation for particular information. Volunteer exercises, entry level positions and other off-grounds encounters are an undeniably vital piece of a Todai training. A lively group Todai is a dynamic group in which world-class analysts cooperate with brilliant understudies from Japan and more than 100  nations. Graduated students occupy top positions all over Japan, Asia, and all around the world. Mission Todai means to be a world-class stage for education and research, contributing to human knowledge in business with other driving worldwide colleges. Todai plans to sustain worldwide pioneers with a solid feeling of open obligation and a spearheading soul, having dual high speciality and broad knowledge. Todai intends to grow the limits of human information in association with society.

HISTORY

      The University of Tokyo was founded during the Meiji government in 1877 by collaboration with the old public schools of medicine and western learning. After that it was named Imperial University in 1886 and then Tokyo Imperial University in 1897. During the earthquake of 1923, 700,000 volumes of Imperial library were destroyed. Even though the university was founded in Meiji period, it has earlier evidence of astronomy agency. For the first time in the history of Todai, the university executed the two undergraduate programs taught in English for the international students in 2012.

Since its inception in 1877, Todai has produced large groups of notable personalities including 15 Japanese prime ministers and eight alumni of the university have received the most prestigious Nobel Prize in different fields of science, Peace and Literature. The university has always focused on advance teaching with research in science and technology to produce the best outputs.

Faculties of Todai includes;

?  Engineering

?  Law

?  Medicine

?  Science

?  Agriculture

?  Economics

?  Arts and Sciences

?  Education

?  Pharmaceutical Science

?  Letters

With these above faculties, the university provides the best guidance and support to their students with the help of their best team of  faculty members.