Trustees to vote on 5% student fee hike

Only now they will officially call it "tuition" rather than "student fees".
California's once-grand Master Plan for Higher Educations now seems to be officially dead.

From the Sac Bee:
California State University trustees will vote on a mid-year fee increase on Nov. 9 that would raise tuition by 5 percent for the spring term.

If the action is approved, tuition for a semester at a CSU campus would rise to $2,220, not including fees that specific campuses charge or books, housing and living expenses.

The proposal is not unexpected. When CSU trustees voted in June to raise fees for the current semester they said they would consider another fee increase after a state budget was approved. The budget Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed earlier this month assumed CSU tuition would go up by 10 percent -- but trustees had raised fees by only 5 percent in June.

"In our analysis, a mid-year adjustment of an additional 5 percent is needed in order to fulfill the budget's promise to restore access to students in a meaningful sense--that is, to restore access to courses and the range of services students need to succeed and graduate," states a CSU report prepared for the Nov. 9 meeting.

A mid-year 5 percent increase in tuition would allow Cal State's 23 campuses to reduce class sizes, offer 3,000 additional course sections and expand student services, the CSU report says.

Cal State officials also are officially changing the terminology they use to describe the money students pay to attend college -- instead of calling it "fees" they will now use the word "tuition." Historically both UC and CSU have used the term "fees" because California's 50-year-old master plan for higher education called for a tuition-free university system. Acknowledging how far the state has strayed from that vision, both of California's public university systems have now decided to start using the word "tuition," just like universities in the rest of the nation.