The Cal State University system board meets today and Wednesday in Long Beach at the Chancellor's office to
discuss and vote on the budget for the next academic year.
Students will be right there with them–not to cheer on the board but to hold wingtips to the fire, loudly protesting against tuition hikes and enrollment cuts that will be on the table.
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Reanna Delgadillo gets the scoop in Cal State Northridge's Daily Sundial.
A 5 percent tuition increase for spring 2011 and a 10 percent jump for the 2011-2012 school year are up for consideration, and they would result in respective $105 and $444 hikes for students those years.
The CSU does plan to ask the state Legislature for help in bringing down the 10 percent charge, but that's like squeezing blood out of a shriveled up turnip.
Cue the Southern California chapters of Students Quality Education (SQE).
“We're putting together a protest demonstration right outside the Chancellor's office in Long Beach,” 21-year-old Daniel Santana tells Delgadillo. “. . . We (are) just trying to build more awareness and pressure them to take the students needs into account.”
Without a state budget, there should be nothing for the CSU board to cut/hike, the SQE maintains.
If the worst happens, one student tells the reporter she will consider going to a community college instead of the CSU. Others who are closer to graduating concede they will have to scramble for grants and scholarships once their budgeted tuition runs out.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.